Evaluating digital ecosystems in Russia's regions

Successful establishment and functioning of the digital economy is possible only in an adequate digital ecosystem, but the semantic and structural content of this system has not been defined adequately yet. Such uncertainty can be found at different levels (federal, regional and local) and in various aspects: subject-related, branch, segment, technical and others. At the same time, the need to implement effective measures for the development of regional digital ecosystems requires not only an understanding of their qualitative content, but also an accurate quantitative assessment. Our paper analyzes conceptual approaches to the definition of a digital ecosystem, provides our own understanding of its full content, which allows us to build a sufficiently verifiable assessment of digital ecosystems development at the regional level. We present a technique for assessing the development of regional digital ecosystems; according to this technique two integrated indices are calculated, and on this basis we carry out an analysis on 82 constituent entities of Russia over the period of two years. The study reveals the existence of significant differentiation between the regions according to the level of development of digital ecosystems; it also helps identify a number of characteristic types of regions in this context. Our assessment has shown that, along with the majority of the regions where the development of digital ecosystems is defined as average, some regions show opposite trends. There are regions, for example, the Belgorod and Kirov oblasts, in which the conditions for the digital environment are below average, but the level of ecosystem development in them is average or higher. There are regions where the situation is the opposite, i.e. the conditions are quite high, but the level of development of the digital ecosystem as a whole leaves much to be desired. Such a negative example is the Moscow Oblast. We also identify leading regions and problem regions. We hope that a reliable assessment of development of digital ecosystems using our technique will help work out effective solutions for successful promotion of the digital economy in Russia.