Going beyond the hype: conceptualising “media ecosystem” for media management research

What is it about?

This article explains why the concept of media ecosystem can be useful in media management research and in practice and defines and operationalises the concept in a model that can be used for empirical research and in practice. The boundaries of an ecosystem are defined by answering the question of what is the joint value proposition (Adner, 2017) as a system-level goal. We posited that compared to business ecosystems, media ecosystems often are much more deeply embedded in national boundaries and affected by governments’ regulations and interventions. Nonetheless, media ecosystems could also expand globally and have the ability to produce global products and services. The scale-independence of the ecosystem, which means it could be of any size and expand across industries, markets and cross geographical boundaries – makes the “ecosystem” an attractive metaphor for both researchers and practitioners.

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