This paper seeks to open a new avenue in terms of study perspective and investigation methodology to explain the effects that strategic alliances may have on the evolutionary dynamics of an ecosystem. More specifically, we aim to shed light on the importance of developing a new systemic metric and a computational model to predict ecosystems’ network dynamics based on the agents’ behavior towards cooperation or acquisition practices. Despite existing literature on ecosystems has largely coped with issues related to the structure (closed networks or structural hole theory), the benefit of a network, or actors’ behavior, it does not provide contributions or methodological frameworks to investigate ecosystem dynamics trigged by collaboration or merger and acquisition strategies. Nevertheless, the topic is particularly relevant to understand for instance present and future dynamics of modern ecosystems (characterized by a high competitive context) or of nascent ecosystems (such as those in less developed countries), that evolve driven by strategic alliances employed between certain actors (i.e. incumbents and startups or incumbents and service providers). Insofar, authors introduce three new issues in the ecosystems management literature to address this topic: i) the relevance of strategic alliances in the ecosystem evolution; ii) the introduction of a new measure of proximity to evaluate the structure and the characterization of the network – the value chain distance -; iii) an integrated methodology to capture ecosystem evolutions – the agent-based simulation combined with the social network analysis – . Authors propose as the unit of analysis the industrial ecosystem, an embryonal ecosystem useful to derive general assumptions on the ecosystem configurations and its evolutionary dynamics. The paper is purely conceptual, its originality concerns the perspective of study and represents the first attempt to propose some direction to better study the evolution of ecosystems as a result of actors’ strategic alliances.