🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the challenges posed by escalating geopolitical, organizational, and technological fragmentation by proposing a multilevel, polycentric digital ecosystem framework spanning individual, organizational, inter-organizational, and global tiers. The framework integrates four key technological clusters—AI and automation, blockchain-based trust mechanisms, federated data spaces, and immersive technologies—to construct a loosely coupled, distributed network that enables cross-border coordination and innovation. By synthesizing these elements, the research extends platform theory and uncovers novel pathways through which AI-driven infrastructures can foster digital integration in an increasingly fragmented world. The proposed approach offers a systematic solution for cross-domain digital collaboration, balancing autonomy with interoperability across diverse institutional and technological contexts.
📝 Abstract
As geopolitical, organizational, and technological fragmentation deepens, resilient digital collaboration becomes imperative. This paper develops a spectrum framework of polycentric digital ecosystems-nested socio-technical systems spanning personal, organizational, inter-organizational, and global layers. Integration across these layers is enabled by four technology clusters: AI and automation, blockchain trust, federated data spaces, and immersive technologies. By redefining digital ecosystems as distributed, adaptive networks of loosely coupled actors, this study outlines new pathways for crossborder coordination and innovation. The framework extends platform theory by introducing a multi-layer conceptualization of polycentric digital ecosystems and demonstrates how AI-enabled infrastructures can be orchestrated to achieve digital integration in a fragmented, multipolar world.