Organizations are widely building digital platforms to transform operations. Digital platforms represent a new way of organizing, as they leverage technology to interconnect providers and consumers. Using digital technologies, organizations are platformizing operations, as they open their rigid and closed boundaries by interconnecting providers and consumers through advanced application programming interfaces (APIs). Early research examined platformized development of technology products, with software development companies—such as Mozilla Foundation—leading the way. However, contemporary organizations are platformizing nontechnology offerings (e.g., ride-sharing or food delivery). With growing interest in platforms, the basic tenets underlying platformization are still not clear. This article synthesizes previous literature examining platforms, with the aim of examining what platformization is and how and why organizations platformize.
Article
Platformizing Organizations: A Synthesis of the Literature
Pankaj Setia, Franck Soh, and Kailing Deng
Article
Digital Platform Innovation and Opportunities
Tammy L. Madsen
Multi-sided digital platform (MSDP) business models have enabled the reorganization of industries and are fundamentally changing the way firms innovate and grow. Fueled by advances in digital technology, digital platform firms such as Apple, Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Tencent, and ByteDance have gained prominence around the globe. MSDPs create value by facilitating interconnections of products, services, or systems generated by a variety of external actors, thereby enabling them to interact in ways that otherwise might be elusive. Theoretical and empirical work on digital platforms also has accelerated in recent decades. Scholars have explored a variety of topics such as platform competition, network effects and their implications, platforms and corporate scope (i.e., vertical integration into complementary offerings), platform types, complementor heterogeneity, and platform governance and ecosystem orchestration. Much of the empirical literature directs attention to the economics of platforms at the exclusion of analyzing how differences in strategic objectives and choices contribute to unique MSDP positions within an ecosystem.
Heterogeneity in strategic objectives contributes to variation in platform scope, governance practices, and potential externalities and thus influences the strategic and organizational benefits accruing to participating actors and the platform itself. It follows that analyzing platforms from a strategic view can help to identify innovations in MSDPs and their governance.
In one novel MSDP model, the co-innovation platform, the primary strategic objective is accelerating innovation and ecosystem growth by enabling collaboration among a wide array of diverse external actors. Aligned with a focus on the quality of collaborations, one of a co-innovation MSDP’s distinguishing value creation features is its hands-on approach to the formation and execution of co-innovation partnerships. This hands-on approach relies on different governance choices and yields a different mix of strategic and organizational benefits for partners and the platform relative to the hands-off approach employed by most MSDPs. Many opportunities exist for advancing theory and empirical work on the implications of platform heterogeneity.
