It is an emerging phenomenon that the leading multinational companies are studying how to use the engagement experiences of customers and communities as the foundation of value co-creation. To achieve this, the business leaders have increasingly adopted an ecological organizational form, namely business ecosystem. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are the real world examples and pioneers in this field. However, in the academic research, it is addressed by a number of researchers that there is significant lack of empirical studies that examines the emergence and formation of business ecosystem, especially in ICT industry. In essence, this study takes Cloud as the context to develop concepts on the emergence of business ecosystem and examine the manifestation of such evolution in the emerging business field.

Through extensive literature reviews and empirical interviews, the current study developed answers to the research question, “How do new business ecosystems emerge, in the context of Cloud computing?” at qualitative level. In general, it is considered in the study that business ecosystem is a type of more advanced business form emerged recently. It has the characteristics as follow: provision of value, integration with external partners, requiring multiple participants, shifting from individual to collaborative thinking, interdependence of the participants, value co-creation, co-petition, open innovation and shared fate of success or failure.

From a macro level viewpoint, the emergence of business ecosystem is the result of the continuous evolution of business forms, from linear type towards a more complex networked type. At a micro level, for an ecosystem to emerge in a given industry, it involves strategic design and appropriate execution. Furthermore, a set of critical elements need to be in the right place for a business ecosystem to emerge, which including: prerequisite conditions for ecosystem to emerge, external environmental and resource, shared vision, leadership of the ecosystem, common platform, mechanisms of the ecosystem, ecosystem healthiness, and IT infrastructure.

The study further suggests that the emergence of business ecosystem as a new business form is not out of luck or probability. It is a natural path that under governance of the evolution forces existing in the social-economic contexts, just as the evolution of all the living creatures in the natural environment. For this broader perspective, the emergence of ecosystem is inevitable due to the social-economic and technological driving forces.