Visualizing Ecosystems of Hype

Abstract

The emergence of new technologies is relentless. While there are many studies that have examined the transformative value, impact, and adoption, our understanding of the underlying ecosystem that shapes the emergence of these new technologies is surprisingly limited. Motivated by the call for pursuing contemporary information systems (IS) research that captures market realities and provides practical relevance, this study uses a data-driven visualization approach to map the ecosystem structure of emerging technologies. We use text mining to identify and extract relevant companies associated with 34 emerging technologies from publicly available data sources (business and technology news, press releases, industry briefings, analyst reports, and blogs) and then apply graph visualization techniques to reveal the corresponding ecosystem structure. We frame our analysis and discussion of these ecosystems in terms of the emerging technology’s maturity stage and time to mainstream adoption. We illustrate our approach using visualizations of nine emerging technologies. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications and offer directions for future data-driven emerging technology ecosystem research.