Improving packaged software through online community knowledge

Packaged software development (PSD) is largely a knowledgeintense activity. Thus, it depends on the organizational capability of developing and combining market and technical knowledge into timely and competitive software products. Given customers’ situated knowledge of the software, software firms increasingly seek new ways to involve customers in their software development activities. As highlighted in the literature, one path for doing this is to use online communities. However, there exists little empirical research that examines the role that communities can play in the commercial endeavor of PSD. To address this omission, this paper examines the benefits and limits of online community use in PSD as it unfolds at the intersection between commercial software firm practices and voluntary community participation. On the basis of this examination, the paper presents implications for both research and practice

Creating new value through repurposing digital innovations

Increasingly, digital ventures generate new value through repurposing existing digital capabilities once encountering new business contexts. However, we know little about such encounters and the process by which a digital innovation is repurposed across multiple business contexts. To this end, we develop a new perspective for understanding repurposing as process of making a product-agnostic digital innovation valuable within and across business contexts. We draw on an in-depth case study of a firm offering a digital platform, which was repurposed across different business contexts with multiple value encounters. In studying these value encounters, we identified three recurring practices for making a product-agnostic digital innovation valuable: platform-inspired envisioning; reconditioning digital capabilities; formulating value narratives. Our new theoretical perspective contributes to the literatures on digital innovation and value creation. First, we contribute to prior technology and innovation studies by capturing and theorizing a new form of recombination, which we label repurposing. The notion of repurposing offers a new way of understanding how digital capabilities can be recombined to offer values across product and market boundaries. Second, we contribute to the digital innovation literature by developing a process model that articulates the dynamics by which digital technology can be repurposed to generate value in innovation across multiple contexts

Seeding for quality of platform complements: evidence from Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem

An important objective for digital platform governance is to ensure the creation of high-quality complements. For nascent platforms, complements are typically the main force in attracting early adopters and, consequently, further improving platform’s attractiveness to potential complementors. In this research-in-progress paper, we study seeding – direct financial support to selected complements by the platform owner – as an indirect governance mechanism in motivating the complement quality improvement in general. The dataset consists of 499 connected home complements on Amazon’s Alexa platform that were released during the first three years after the platform launch. The preliminary findings reveal that complements launched after platform owner’s seeding actions generally show better quality. Such a quality improvement effect seems to be reinforced if the platform owner can conduct repetitive seeding on the same complement. However, the effectiveness of repetitive seeding may vary depending on the investment and the maturity of the target complement’s business

Creating new value through repurposing digital innovations

Increasingly, digital ventures generate new value through repurposing existing digital capabilities once encountering new business contexts. However, we know little about such encounters and the process by which a digital innovation is repurposed across multiple business contexts. To this end, we develop a new perspective for understanding repurposing as process of making a product-agnostic digital innovation valuable within and across business contexts. We draw on an in-depth case study of a firm offering a digital platform, which was repurposed across different business contexts with multiple value encounters. In studying these value encounters, we identified three recurring practices for making a product-agnostic digital innovation valuable: platform-inspired envisioning; reconditioning digital capabilities; formulating value narratives. Our new theoretical perspective contributes to the literatures on digital innovation and value creation. First, we contribute to prior technology and innovation studies by capturing and theorizing a new form of recombination, which we label repurposing. The notion of repurposing offers a new way of understanding how digital capabilities can be recombined to offer values across product and market boundaries. Second, we contribute to the digital innovation literature by developing a process model that articulates the dynamics by which digital technology can be repurposed to generate value in innovation across multiple contexts

Re-representation as work design in outsourcing: a semiotic view

Outsourcing work relies on the supplier’s interpretation of the work delegated by the client. Existing streams of outsourcing literature tend to assume that the supplier should use the same convention as the client to make sense of the work package. In this research, we use a semiotic lens to challenge this assumption by viewing such sensemaking as a process of decoding symbolic representations. This complementary view involves innovative use of digital technology for re-representing the outsourced work through new conventions. We studied a Chinese business process outsourcing supplier in-depth to learn how such re-representation is achieved through the creation of special-purpose languages. Our research contributes to the Information Systems (IS) outsourcing literature by providing a semiotic view on the design of outsourcing work supported by digital technologies. Three re-representation practices (i.e., dissociating the signifiers, signifying through new conventions, and embedding new conventions in the digital infrastructure) constitute the core of this view. The results are highly significant for outsourcing theory and practice, not least since they suggest that the use of semiotics and visuals for re-representation may enable suppliers to reformulate outsourcing work and the expertise needed to deliver services

Comparing platform owners' early and late entry into complementary markets

Research on platform owners’ entry into complementary markets points in divergent directions. One strand of the literature reports a squeeze on post-entry complementor profits due to increased competition, while another strand observes positive effects as increased customer attention and innovation benefit the complementary market as a whole. In this research note, we seek to transcend these conflicting views by comparing the effects of the early and late timing of platform owners’ entry. We apply a difference-in-differences design to explore the drivers and effects of the timing of platform owners' entry using data from three entries that Amazon made into its Alexa voice assistant’s complementary markets. Our findings suggest that early entry is driven by the motivation to boost the overall value creation of the complementary market, whereas late entry is driven by the motivation to capture value already created in a key complementary market. Importantly, our findings suggest that early entry, contrary to late entry, creates substantial consumer attention that benefits complementors that offer specialized functionality. In addition, they also suggest that complementors with more experience are more likely to benefit from the increased consumer attention. We contribute to platform research by showing that the timing of the platform owner’s entry matters in a way that potentially can reconcile conflicting findings regarding the consequences of platform owners' entry into complementary markets. </p

Recombination in the open-ended value landscape of digital innovation

Digital innovation introduces a new open-ended value landscape to anyone seeking to generate or capture new value. To understand this landscape, we distinguish between design recombination and use recombination, explore how they play out together, and redirect the attention from products and services toward digital resources. Digital resources serve as building-blocks in digital innovation, and they hold the potential to simultaneously be part of multiple value paths, offered through design recombination and assembled through use recombination. Building on this perspective, we offer the value spaces framework as a tool for better understanding value creation and capture in digital innovation. We illustrate the framework and offer the early contours of a research agenda for information systems researchers

Growing on steroids: rapidly scaling the user base of digital ventures through digital innovation

Digital ventures, start-ups growing by drawing on and adding to digital infrastructures, can scale their business at an unprecedented pace. We view such rapid scaling as a generative process by which a venture’s user base increases significantly between two points in time through digital innovation. We studied WeCash, a Chinese digital venture, nearly doubling its user base monthly, to learn more about this generative process. We trace three contingent mechanisms underpinning rapid scaling: data-driven operation, instant release, and swift transformation. We explain these mechanisms and how they interact in the rapid scaling of digital ventures. The research offers an agency perspective on scaling of digital ventures that speaks to the digital innovation literature

Comparing platform owners' early and late entry into complementary markets

Research on platform owners’ entry into complementary markets points in divergent directions. One strand of the literature reports a squeeze on post-entry complementor profits due to increased competition, while another strand observes positive effects as increased customer attention and innovation benefit the complementary market as a whole. In this research note, we seek to transcend these conflicting views by comparing the effects of the early and late timing of platform owners’ entry. We apply a difference-in-differences design to explore the drivers and effects of the timing of platform owners' entry using data from three entries that Amazon made into its Alexa voice assistant’s complementary markets. Our findings suggest that early entry is driven by the motivation to boost the overall value creation of the complementary market, whereas late entry is driven by the motivation to capture value already created in a key complementary market. Importantly, our findings suggest that early entry, contrary to late entry, creates substantial consumer attention that benefits complementors that offer specialized functionality. In addition, they also suggest that complementors with more experience are more likely to benefit from the increased consumer attention. We contribute to platform research by showing that the timing of the platform owner’s entry matters in a way that potentially can reconcile conflicting findings regarding the consequences of platform owners' entry into complementary markets. </p