Аннотация:Traditional business ecosystems being a functional unity of cooperated enterprises and environment in which they are embedded belong to the meso-economic level. Considered in relation to the ecosystems of biological sphere, with the usage of four-typed system language of description, they may be interpreted, according to the system presentation proposed by George Kleiner, as objects, environments, processes and projects which in relation to the social-economic ecosystems have connotation to organizations, infrastructural formations, business processes and innovative projects. To characterize features of the business ecosystems, besides the four-typed system language, corresponding institutional notions are offered whose study is taken with the analogical system positions where institutions, according to Bagrat Yerznkyan, are presented as objects (players – economic agents), environments (market, firm or hybrid rules of the game), processes (plays of the game), projects (long-time norms of behavior). Features of the different business ecosystems with indication of dominated characteristics are analyzed. They are as follows: innovation-oriented industrial clusters as objective (organizational) systems, technological platforms as environmental systems, networks or related by networking structures as processed systems and business-incubators as projective systems. In such context the ecosystem serves as an “umbrella” term to characterize the all of its types.
However, there are ecosystems at micro-level as well. In a sense such are self-managed enterprises, which can be treated as ecosystems with internalized environment, or ecosystems in miniature. In fact, inside these enterprises, where agents are at the same time principals, dominate the cooperative relations based on the institution of trust. The peculiarity of such enterprises lies in the fact that they create an internally comfortable environment for themselves, characterized by network relations and the absence of a principal-agent dichotomy. Since employees act as such and as owners, there is no agency problem, which can save on the transaction costs of interaction. Such an undertaking could be called as ecosystem, but it was special in the sense that the external environment appeared internalized. Philosophically, while the traditional firms (enterprises) can be presented as “things-in-themselves”, the business ecosystems as “things-in-environment”, the self-managed enterprises better to characterize as “things-in-environment-in-themselves”.
Trends in the organizational development of the modern enterprises and ecosystems both of meso- and micro-level, are contradictory and varied. In some ecosystems, network relations dominate, in others they close with hybrid devices; in some, centralized subordination relations prevail, in others, decentralized ones. The ecosystem approach should be targeted, rather than campaign-oriented, and should take into account, in addition to explicit spatial characteristics, the temporal characteristics of economic development, even if they were implicitly present.