Analysis of business connections utilizing theory of topology of random graphs

Abstract

A business ecosystem is a system that describes interactions between organizations. In this paper, we build a theoretical framework that defines a model which can be used to analyze the business ecosystem. The basic concepts within the framework are organizations, business connections, and market, that are all defined in the paper. Many researchers analyze the performance and structure of business using the workflow of the business. Our work in business connections answers a different set of questions, concerning the monetary value in the business ecosystem, rather than the task-interaction view that is provided by workflow analysis. We apply methods for analysis of the topology of complex networks, characterized by the concepts of small path length, clustering, and scale-free degree distributions. To model the dynamics of the business ecosystem we analyze the notion of the state of an organization at a given instant of time. We point out that the notion of state in this case is fundamentally different from the concept of state of the system which is used in classical or quantum physics. To describe the state of the organization at a given time one has to know the probability of payments to contracts which in fact depend on the future behavior of the agents on the market. Therefore methods of p-adic analysis are appropriate to explore such a behavior. Microeconomic and macroeconomic factors are indivisible and moreover the actual state of the organization depends on the future. In this framework some simple models are analyzed in detail. Company strategy can be influenced by analysis of models, which can provide a probabilistic understanding of the market, giving degrees of predictability. © 2006 American Institute of Physics.