Digital platforms can be opened in two ways to promote innovation and value generation. A platform owner can open access for third-party participants by establishing boundary resources, such as APIs ...and an app store, to allow complements to be developed and shared for the platform. Furthermore, to foster cooperation with the complementors, the platform owner can use an open-source license boundary resource to open and share the platform’s core resources. However, openness that is too wide renders the platform and its shared resources vulnerable to strategic exploitation. To our knowledge, platform strategies that promote such negative outcomes have remained unexplored in past research. We identify and analyze a prominent form of strategic exploitation called platform forking in which a hostile firm, i.e., a forker, bypasses the host’s controlling boundary resources and exploits the platform’s shared resources, core and complements, to create a competing platform business. We investigate platform forking on Google’s Android platform, a successful open digital platform, by analyzing the fate of five Android forks and related exploitative activities. We observe several strategies that illustrate alternative ways of bundling a platform fork from a set of host, forker, and other resources. We also scrutinize Google’s responses, which modified Android’s boundary resources to curb exploitation and retain control. In this paper, we make two contributions. First, we present a theorization of the competitive advantage of open digital platforms and specifically expose platform forking as an exploitative and competitive platform strategy. Second, we extend platform governance literature by showing how boundary resources, which are mainly viewed as cooperative governance mechanisms, are also used to combat platform forking and thus sustain a platform’s competitive advantage.
Industrial manufacturers increasingly develop digital platforms in the business-to-business (B2B) context. This emergent form of digital platforms requires a profound yet little understood holistic ...perspective that encompasses the co-evolution of platform architecture, platform services, and platform governance. To address this research gap, our study examines multiple platform sponsors from an industrial manufacturing context. The study demarcates three platform archetypes: product platform, supply chain platform, and platform ecosystem. We argue that each platform archetype involves a gradual development of platform architecture, platform services, and platform governance, which mirror each other. We also find that each platform archetype is characterized by a specific innovation mechanism that contributes to the platform service discovery and expands the platform value. Our study extends the co-evolution perspective of platform ecosystem literature and digital servitization literature.
•Study examines the evolution of industrial digital platforms.•Study demarcates three platform archetypes: product platform, supply chain platform, and platform ecosystem.•Study argues that each platform archetype involves co-evolution of platform architecture, platform services, and platform governance, which mirror each other.•Study finds that each platform archetype is characterized by a specific innovation mechanism that contributes to the platform service discovery and expands the platform value.
We study how platform owners’ decision to enter complementary markets affects innovation in the ecosystem surrounding the platform. Despite heated debates on the behavior of platform owners toward ...complementors, relatively little is known about the mechanisms linking platform owners’ entry and complementary innovation. We exploit Google’s 2015 entry into the market for photography apps on its own Android platform as a quasi-experiment. We conclude based on our analyses of a time-series panel of 6,620 apps that Google’s entry was associated with a substantial increase in complementary innovation. We estimate that the entry caused a 9.6% increase in the likelihood of major updates for apps affected by Google’s entry, compared to similar but not affected apps. Further analyses suggest that Google’s entry triggered complementary innovation because of the increased consumer attention for photography apps, instead of competitive “racing” or “Red Queen” effects. This attention spillover effect was particularly pronounced for larger and more diversified complementors. The study advances our understanding of the effects of platform owner’s entry, explicates the complex mechanisms that shape complementary innovation, and adds empirical evidence to the debate on regulating platforms.
The online appendix is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2018.0787
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Companies across industries are shifting toward a platform ecosystem strategy. By leveraging cloud computing technologies, companies aim to benefit from collaboration with a wide range of third-party ...developers within emergent platform ecosystems. To succeed, these companies need to develop new organizational capabilities to co-create and capture value in platform ecosystems. To understand what capabilities are crucial to establish platform ecosystems and how they contribute to value co-creation and value capture, we conducted a multi-year, in-depth case study of SAP’s cloud platform project. We identified (1) technology-related capabilities (cloud-based platformization, open IT landscape management) and (2) relationship-driven capabilities (ecosystem orchestration, platform evangelism, platform co-selling) and illustrate how these capabilities help the platform owner to enable and balance value co-creation and value capture in an emergent platform ecosystem. With our findings, we contribute to the discussion on how companies can overcome the challenging emergent phase of platform ecosystems. We thereby bridge literature on value creation in platform ecosystems and on organizational capabilities. Though we conducted our study in the context of the enterprise software industry, we discuss how our findings apply to prospective platform owners from different contexts.
This paper draws on complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory to explore the transformation of an analog automation product platform as it was infused with extensive and deepening digital capacities over ...a 40-year period. Our case demonstrates how the deepening digitization of components and functions drives complexity by connecting the platform to multiple social and technical settings and producing new interactions and information exchanges. The increased connectivity and dynamism invited unexpected and significant architectural and organizational shifts that moved the platform toward an ecosystem-centered organizing logic. CAS theory and its notion of constrained generating procedures (CGPs) are used to analyze how new connections and interactions produced a multilevel and nonlinear change in the platform organization. We offer two main contributions. First, we provide a novel empirical analysis of how product platform digitization leads to phase transitions and show the mediating role of three mechanisms in this process treated as CGPs: interaction rules, design control, and stimuli-response variety. Second, we demonstrate the multilevel and recursive nature of digitally driven growth in physical product platforms.
With platforms accounting for 1–3% of paid work in advanced economies, discussions on their impact on labor are proliferating. Focusing on commercial platforms providing intermediation to a workforce ...available on-demand, we further systematize the field by approaching platform-mediated work through the lens of (in)visibility. We map four basic forms of platform-mediated work against three variations of (in)visibility: (1) perceptible, (2) institutional, and (3) individual, and discuss the implications through the stories of three protagonists of platform workers. The suggested meta-analysis tool for understanding the mechanism of rendering platform workers obscure exposes who is recognized as a worker, what is recognized as work, and how these questions are negotiated in a platform-mediated digital space. As such, the framework provides a joint space for the discussions of the core issues of the field—from regulation and uncertainties of platform employment, through exacerbating vulnerabilities of workers, to surveillance and self-governance.
Diverse forms of offshore oil and gas structures are utilized for a wide range of purposes and in varying water depths. They are designed for unique environments and water depths around the world. ...The applications of these offshore structures require different activities for proper equipment selection, design of platform types, and drilling/production methods. This paper will provide a general overview of these operations as well as the platform classifications. In this paper, a comprehensive review is conducted on different offshore petroleum structures. This study examines the fundamentals of all types of offshore structures (fixed and floating), as well as the applications of these concepts for oil exploration and production. The study also presents various design parameters for state-of-the-art offshore platforms and achievements made in the industry. Finally, suitable types of offshore platforms for various water depths are offered for long-term operations. An extension of this study (Part II) covers sustainable design approaches and project management on these structures; this review helps designers in understanding existing offshore structures, and their uniqueness. Hence, the review also serves as a reference data source for designing new offshore platforms and related structures.
With intense global competition, many manufacturing companies pursue a platform strategy to develop diverse products belonging to a family, while utilizing available manufacturing resources. In the ...past, enormous efforts have been made in investigating product platforms, which exploit platforming potential at the design stage. Researchers have recently discussed new platform concepts, which capitalize on platforming potential at different product family development stages, in addition to investigating more issues pertaining to product platforms. These efforts contribute to the continuous progress on platforming research. This study provides a review of progress on platforming. It identifies and reviews the available platform concepts, including flexible platforms, function–technology platforms, process platforms, and process parameter platforms. It also highlights several trends in platforming research, thus providing an overall picture of platform based-product family development requirements and the corresponding solutions. Based on the review, a framework is presented for future research.
A scalable, flexible and reliable Analytics service has become a requirement toward building efficient Fifth Generation (5G) experimental platforms that can support a suite of end-user experiments ...and verticals. Our paper presents the challenges that come with designing such a service-based Analytics component, and shows how we have used it in the context of open experimental platforms in the 5GENESIS project. Our Analytics service was designed both for enabling the efficient setup and configuration of the underlying platform, and also for ensuring that it provides useful insights into the experimentation Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) toward the end-user. Thus, Analytics proved to be a useful tool across several stages, starting from ensuring correct operation during the initial phases of the network setup and continuing into the normal day-to-day experimentation. Our experiments show how the tool was used in our setup and provide information on how to apply it to different environments. The Analytics component, designed as a set of microservices that serve several goals in the analytics workflow, is also provided as open source, being part of the Open5Genesis suite.
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