The increasing prevalence of multi-sided online platforms and their influence on international entrepreneurship: The rapid transformation of entrepreneurial digital ecosystems

A set of diverse, evolving, and interactive forces are strengthening trends toward the digitization of firms business models and operations at a relatively fast pace and are affecting firms’ operations at relatively micro levels. They are also changing the ecosystems at the macro level through rapid digitization, augmented by the forces of change in the environment, including the progressive developments in communication and information technology and the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), www3.0, and I 4.0 amongst others. A review of the change and the evolutionary trends in the past 2 decades is highlighted to enable a discussion and characterization of the rapidly dominating digital ecosystems and their impacts on firms, especially iSMEs. This article examines the entrepreneurial digital ecosystem (EDE) to bring it within our theoretical and iSMEs’ easy operational reach with a few brief case-study examples of multi-sided online platforms and their increasingly disruptive impacts so far. Four schematic presentations portray the involved processes and are presented in Figs 1, 2, 3a and 3b; a comparative analysis of the top online multi-sided platform is presented in Table 1. They are operating within the macro entrepreneurial digital ecosystem, while modifying their own micro dimensions to their advantage and affecting the macro EDE. For ease of adoption and operationalization, the principal operating characteristics of a typical macro entrepreneurial digital ecosystem, each representing a distinct strategic function, are identified and re-articulated for SMEs’ and internationalized SMEs’ (iSMEs) ease of access and use for building their own corresponding micro EDE operations in order to exploit its advantages and avoid its emerging potential hazards.