Building the city’s business networks: Using visualisations for business ecosystem governance

Abstract

Metropolitan regions today cultivate business ecosystems fostering city competitiveness and urban development. In these urban ecosystems, firms, public authorities and other stakeholders form business networks to collaborate and innovate. Our research concerns the visualisation of urban business ecosystems with the aim of designing management instruments for city management and ecosystem governance. In this chapter, we review previous action design research where we applied a visual analytic system to facilitate ecosystem modelling and analysis. Our conceptual insights led us to formulate design requirements for management instruments in the urban ecosystem context. Our short review highlights findings with respect to visualising urban ecosystems on the basis of ecosystem models and identifies which capabilities remain missing for designing actionable management instruments for ecosystem governance.