Enterprises have to continuously act in and adapt to altered environments. They have to compete and cooperate with an increasing number of actors in their business ecosystems. These actors and their interests, processes and IT need to be considered for strategy formulation, inter-organizational process optimization or large-scale projects aiming at changing whole parts of an ecosystem. While the concept of business ecosystems is generally applicable for these altered environments, it lacks the consideration of IT phenomena. The integration of IT related concepts from other approaches is hardly possible due to major
differences in the underlying ontologies. Therefore, we conducted three case studies in different industries to develop an empirically grounded ontology for analyzing IT-based interventions in business ecosystems. In an iterative and inductive-deductive approach, we developed an ontology consisting of two general
perspectives (structural, dynamic) with seven concepts each.