ICT Platform-Enabled Socio-Economic Ecosystem in Himalayan Villages of India: The Case of a Forest Protection and Renewable Energy Production Project

Abstract

There is a growing focus on developing ICT-based business ecosystems to provide an innovative and socially-embedded solution that is aligned with the UN’s sustainable development goals. However, general approaches being used to build the ICT-based business ecosystems face significant challenges in achieving sustainability, participation, and self-organization on their own. In this research, we pursue the new conceptualization of emergent digital designing to understand these challenges and leverage the concepts of multi-sided platforms to design and transform an ICT-based socio-economic ecosystem that enables co-creation of value. Specifically, we use the activity theory perspective to analyze the required features in the development of an ICT-based socio-economic ecosystem for forest protection and renewable energy production. Based on our case analysis, we construct a typology of various features that an ICT-based socio-economic ecosystem should imbibe to facilitate value co-creation by various actors of the ecosystem. This research contributes to the theory of the solution genre by presenting a feature set related to different aspects of the socio-economic ecosystems. We also highlight the needed minimalistic view of ICTs in the digital transformations of societal and environmental initiatives.