Digital Ecosystems: Enabling Collaboration in a Fragmented World
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: As geopolitical, organizational, and technological fragmentation deepens, resilient digital collaboration becomes imperative. This paper develops a spectrum framework of polycentric digital ecosystems-nested socio-technical systems spanning personal, organizational, inter-organizational, and global layers. Integration across these layers is enabled by four technology clusters: AI and automation, blockchain trust, federated data spaces, and immersive technologies. By redefining digital ecosystems as distributed, adaptive networks of loosely coupled actors, this study outlines new pathways for crossborder coordination and innovation. The framework extends platform theory by introducing a multi-layer conceptualization of polycentric digital ecosystems and demonstrates how AI-enabled infrastructures can be orchestrated to achieve digital integration in a fragmented, multipolar world.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Author: Schmitt, Marc
Institution: University of Oxford
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7128810760
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