The choice of an ecosystem strategy is one of the key issues for modern business. Very often, companies want to become leaders by creating proprietary platforms and attracting third-party participants, although this approach is associated with high costs and risks. At the same time, the possibility participation in existing digital ecosystems is typically overlooked in strategic planning. The opportunities for ecosystem participants are very rarely discussed in both business and academic literature.Our research demonstrates that there is a wide variety of participants in digital ecosystems, from individual entrepreneurs to international companies, from those earning extra personal income to multibillion-dollar corporations. Contrary to the common notion that platforms and businesses operating on them represent two radically different “leagues” in terms of financial flows and market power, we observed a smooth continuum of participants from micro-businesses to global corporations that can compete with ecosystem leaders for a decisive vote in key strategic issues. Participation in third-party ecosystems provides for rapid success with a minimum of capital expenditures through access to an established audience that trusts the platform. However, the ease of creating new businesses creates a boomerang effect: growing and evolving competition is the main challenge for ecosystem participants. Digital business ecosystems become an environment for both fierce competition and mutually beneficial cooperation. They open a new page in the development of organizational management systems – the era of distributed polycentric business management, where even the most insignificant participants ultimately contribute to the formation of a common strategy and operational decisions. The cases we have studied reveal the presence of “hidden business layers” in ecosystems. It turns out that in addition to the platform and sellers, numerous services that assist with sales, and in some cases, purchases, are also ecosystem participants. We call these layers “hidden” because these services are practically invisible to an outsider. As a result, even structurally simple transaction ecosystems become more complex and begin to resemble solution ecosystems. Two types of services offered on hidden layers can be distinguished, namely, those facilitating and integrating participation in ecosystems. Facilitators help individual businesses within the ecosystem to be more successful, in particular, to avoid direct price competition. Integrators help individual participants create joint offers, as well as operate on several platforms at the same time, thus creating sort of “sub-ecosystems”. Companies that operate within hidden layers play a significant role in balancing the power within the ecosystem, creating space for a kind of collective opposition of sellers (sometimes buyers) to the platforms’ dominance. From a certain point of view, managing digital ecosystems is like public administration: it implies coordination of actions of independent actors with diverging interests using a rather limited set of tools of coercion and punishment. This allows applying certain elements of “polycentric governance” theory to them, designed to describe the phenomena that “lies in the middle between classical markets and the state”
