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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.

Online communities (OCs) are emerging as effective spaces for knowledge collaboration and innovation. As a new form of organizing, they offer possibilities for collaboration that extend beyond what is feasible in the traditional hierarchy. OC participants generate new ideas, talk about knowledge, and remix and build on each other’s contributions on a massive scale. OCs are characterized by fluidity in the resources that they draw upon, and they need to manage these tensions in order to sustain knowledge collaboration generatively. OCs sustain knowledge collaboration by facilitating both tacit and explicit knowledge flows. Further, OCs play a key role in supporting and sustaining the knowledge collaboration process that is necessary for open and user innovation. As collective spaces of knowledge flows, OCs are mutually constituted by digital technologies and participants. The future is bright for OC research adopting the knowledge perspective and focusing on how to sustain their knowledge flow.