Digital platform openness: Drivers, dimensions and outcomes (original) (raw)

Digital Platform Establishment: Navigating Competing Concerns in Emerging Ecosystems

Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2019

Digital Platforms impose organizing logics on ecosystems. Dependent on their configuration, they enable certain practices, relationships, and value distribution among actors while preventing alternatives. Incumbent platforms often have a strong power to implement contested configurations since they control access to attractive user groups/markets. However, emerging platforms have a small degree of bargaining power in relation to key actors since they have not yet achieved such a position. Although numerous studies detail governance strategies for incumbent platform ecosystems, research on how platform providers navigate competing concerns in emerging platform ecosystems remain rare. We report on a study of the establishment and continuous dynamics of a digital platform used for service innovation. We inductively identify a pattern of the dynamics in this navigation process, locate four salient tensions driving these dynamics, and provide insights on how the platform provider navigated them.

The Digital Platform: A Research Agenda

Journal of Information Technology, 2017

As digital platforms are transforming almost every industry today, they are slowly finding their way into the mainstream information systems (ISs) literature. Digital platforms are a challenging research object because of their distributed nature and intertwinement with institutions, markets and technologies. New research challenges arise as a result of the exponentially growing scale of platform innovation, the increasing complexity of platform architectures and the spread of digital platforms to many different industries. This paper develops a research agenda for digital platforms research in IS. We recommend researchers seek to (1) advance conceptual clarity by providing clear definitions that specify the unit of analysis, degree of digitality and the sociotechnical nature of digital platforms; (2) define the proper scoping of digital platform concepts by studying platforms on different architectural levels and in different industry settings; and (3) advance methodological rigour...

Digital Platforms: A Review and Future Directions

The increasing adoption of digital platforms as a new mode of organizing economic and social activities has led to a growing interest in research on this topic amongst IS scholars. As a result, the digital platforms literature has grown significantly over the last decade. Yet, scholars call for more research on the topic as platforms evolve and many questions remain unanswered. There is therefore a need to take stock of the existing literature in order to gain better visibility of what has been achieved and what directions future research can take. We conducted a systematic review of the literature on digital platforms including 96 articles, covering IS and management journals. Key findings of this study show an ambiguity in the current conceptualization of digital platforms. They also highlight the multi-dimensional nature of digital platforms which reflects the heterogeneity of their manifestations in practice.

Platform Competition: A Systematic and Interdisciplinary Review of the Literature

Journal of Management, 2020

Over the past three decades, platform competition-the competition between firms that facilitate transactions and govern interactions between two or more distinct user groups who are connected via an indirect network-has attracted significant interest from the fields of management and organizations, information systems, economics, and marketing. Despite common interests in research questions, methodologies, and empirical contexts by scholars from across these fields, the literature has developed mostly in isolated fashion. This article offers a systematic and interdisciplinary review of the literature on platform competition by analyzing a sample of 333 articles published between 1985 and 2019. The review contributes by (a) documenting how the literature on platform competition has evolved; (b) outlining four themes of shared scholarly interest, including how network effects generate "winner-takes-all" dynamics that influence strategies, such as pricing and quality; how network externalities and platform strategy interact with corporate-level decisions, such as vertical integration or diversification into complementary goods; how heterogeneity in the platform and its users influences platform dynamics; and how the platform "hub" orchestrates value creation and capture in the overall ecosystem; and (c) highlighting several areas for future research. The review aims to facilitate a broader understanding of the platform competition research that helps to advance our knowledge of how platforms compete to create and capture value.

Fostering digital platform innovation: From two to multi‐sided platforms

Creativity and Innovation Management, 2019

Two‐sided markets and digital platforms are becoming increasingly relevant in the modern scenario. Companies like Airbnb and Uber are inspiring many other firms in different fields that share their basic structure: they match two (or more) groups of customers. This research aims at exploring the innovation strategies companies such as these rely on to expand their basic structure towards more complex models. Being inspired by previous models in the field and considering the role that big data seems to play in these businesses, a first conceptual model is presented. Therefore, 100 companies—using mobile apps as the empirical setting—are explored in this research to understand the common behaviors concerning evolution. In the end, three strate- gies are presented: Supply (Side) Expansion, Transactional Advertising, and Data Trad- ing. These strategies are further discussed to highlight two main directions of innovation—ecosystem innovation and data push innovation—which may be merged giving birth to multi‐sided epiphanies. The paper contributes to the literature showing various strategies and their implication to foster innovation on two‐sided platforms. Moreover, it shows possible ways to exploit the value embedded in the complex eco- systems of the relationships they create.

Platform Establishment: Navigating Competing Concerns in Emerging Ecosystems

2019

Digital Platforms impose organizing logics on ecosystems. Dependent on their configuration, they enable certain practices, relationships, and value distribution among actors while preventing alternatives. Incumbent platforms often have a strong power to implement contested configurations since they control access to attractive user groups/markets. However, emerging platforms have a small degree of bargaining power in relation to key actors since they have not yet achieved such a position. Although numerous studies detail governance strategies for incumbent platform ecosystems, research on how platform providers navigate competing concerns in emerging platform ecosystems remain rare. We report on a study of the establishment and continuous dynamics of a digital platform used for service innovation. We inductively identify a pattern of the dynamics in this navigation process, locate four salient tensions driving these dynamics, and provide insights on how the platform provider navigated them.

Opening Platforms: How, When and Why?

Platforms, Markets and Innovation, 2009

Platform-mediated networks encompass several distinct types of participants, including end users, complementors, platform providers who facilitate users' access to complements, and sponsors who develop platform technologies. Each of these roles can be opened-that is, structured to encourage participation-or closed. This paper reviews factors that motivate decisions to open or close mature platforms. At the platform provider and sponsor levels, these decisions entail: 1) interoperating with established rival platforms; 2) licensing additional platform providers; or 3) broadening sponsorship. With respect to end users and complementors, decisions to open or close a mature platform involve: 1) backward compatibility with prior platform generations; 2) securing exclusive rights to certain complements; or 3) absorbing complements into the core platform. Over time, forces tend to push both proprietary and shared platforms toward hybrid governance models characterized by centralized control over platform technology (i.e., closed sponsorship) and shared responsibility for serving users (i.e., an open provider role).

Multi-sided Platforms: Current State And Future Research

Russian Management Journal, 2019

In the digital age traditional ways of doing business have been transformed by a group of new platform-driven companies like Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb and some others. This relatively new digital economy research phenomenon requires inclusive understanding. The paper explores and questions platform research in the context of digital MSPs. It provides main definitions and discusses the concept of digital platform stack framework. The characteristics, advantages and disadvantages, opportunities and threats associated with the activities of digital platforms have been considered. The paper systematizes current research with a focus on the platform digital transformation, strategy, business models and architecture and suggests agenda for future research.

Platform economy & digital platforms

2016

The emergence of software-based platforms is shifting competition towards platform-centric ecosystems, although this phenomenon has not received much attention in information systems research. Our premise is that the coevolution of the design, governance, and environmental dynamics of such ecosystems influences how they evolve. We present a framework for understanding platform-based ecosystems and discuss five broad research questions that present significant research opportunities for contributing homegrown theory about their evolutionary dynamics to the IS discipline, and distinctive IT-artifactcentric contributions to the strategy, economics, and software engineering reference disciplines.