Service Ecosystems: a Descriptive Review of the existing Literature

This paper proposes a descriptive review of service ecosystems, as the first step of a systematic literary review aiming to improve the existing understanding of service ecosystems in the management field. For the purpose of this study, 188 articles were selected and examined according to the following analytical categories: 1) Areas of knowledge within which authors have published research on service ecosystems; 2) Years in which the articles were published; 3) Countries where authors have published research on service ecosystems; 4) Journals in which authors have published their researches; and 5) Type of paper and adopted methodology. According to the research’s findings, a growing interest toward service ecosystems has been developed for the last ten years, especially referring with the two main areas of Decision Making and Ecosystems Management.