Enterprise ecological niche measurement and competitive effect analysis based on digital business recognition

Previous studies have emphasised the positive role of digital technologies in gaining competitive advantage, but the differences between technologies and the role of environmental matching have been overlooked. In this paper, we explore the relative positions and competitive landscape formed by digital technology firms. First, the study uses an NLP approach to measure corporate ecological niche based on digital business, which includes two indicators of width and overlap, and the original corpus comes from the annual reports of 409 listed companies. Then, based on the ecological niche separation theory, we analyse the competitive effects. The results show that the competitive effect formed by the representative digital technology enterprises can be divided into complementary, independent and substitution. Among them, cloud computing and big data enterprises are at the stage of complementary effect, blockchain enterprises form a unique independent competitive pattern, while the substitution effect of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things enterprises is more obvious. This paper implements an ecological niche measure that embodies digital features, which delivers fresh and useful insights into the application of the ecological niche theory in the digital environments and further reveals the unique competitive dynamics in the digital environment.