Making Digital Infrastructures More Generative Through Platformization and Platform- driven Software Development: An Explorative Case Study

Digital innovation platforms are particularly known for their generativity producing and reproducing flexible solutions for multiple user groups and attracting third-party developers. Consequently, as a concept, generativity often relates to the consumer market as its focal unit of analysis. In contrast, this paper takes a public sector organization as a unit of analysis, investigating the potential for developing more generative digital infrastructures through processes of platformization and platform-driven software development practices. We define platformization as the transition from silo-based organization to platform-based organization, where the dismantling of monolithic legacy systems enables new ways of organizing the development and maintenance of software development. By decoupling systems, organizations can recouple their organization to overcome the limitations of traditional silo-based organization. Our contribution is twofold. First, we contribute by describing platformization as a sociotechnical process that consist of changes to both infrastructure and organization, where the dismantling of monolithic applications enables new ways of organizing the development and maintenance of software. Second, we contribute by theorizing how platformization processes can produce increased generativity for the IT organization and its digital infrastructure

Collaborative Innovation in Healthcare: Boundary Resources for Peripheral Actors

Realizing the potential of digital technologies in hospital care requires collaborative innovation among multiple actors both within and beyond hospitals. Our research investigates the question: what does it take to foster collaborative innovation within a traditionally siloed and closed health information infrastructure? Empirical findings are derived from three cases, which we analyze by focusing on how innovation relates to interfaces with hospitals’ information infrastructures. We draw on literature on digital platforms and innovation ecosystems and focus on the notion of boundary resources to characterize these innovation interfaces. While this notion has mainly addressed the concerns of platform owners for ‘securing’ and ‘resourcing’ their platforms, our analysis also points to resources related to peripheral actors’ needs, specifically ‘discovering’ and ‘vesting’ resources. Discovering resources assist innovators in making sense of possibilities and limitations, while vesting resources relate to value appropriation. These resources are crucial for collaborative innovation in existing hospital information infrastructures

Implications of Emerging Financial Regulatory Reporting Frameworks for Digital Platforms Boundary Resources

Regulators and banks have identified the necessity of a more holistic and harmonized approach for financial regulatory reporting than the current approach of just adopting new regulations to decrease the reporting burden on banking industry. Thus, new platform-based reporting frameworks for supervisory and statistical reporting of banks are being discussed to foster more efficient processing and reporting of data in Europe. Toward this goal, we use the e3-value method to model the ecosystem of emerging financial regulatory reporting frameworks based on publicly available laws, legal documents, guidelines published, consultations and industry surveys by supervisory authorities. Extending Ghazawneh & Henfridsson (2013) conceptualizations of boundary resources, the paper reveals that the boundary resources for financial regulatory reporting platforms will have to be co-created with the emerging regulatory reporting framework itself as foundation for the boundary resources and the regulated entity (i.e. banks) as they require the control about their sensitive data

Governance Mechanisms in Digital Platform Ecosystems: Addressing the Generativity-Control Tension

Digital platform owners repeatedly face paradoxical design decisions with regard to their platforms’ generativity and control, requiring them to facilitate co-innovation whilst simultaneously retaining control over third-party complementors. To address this challenge, platform owners deploy a variety of governance mechanisms. However, researchers and practitioners currently lack a coherent understanding of what major governance mechanisms platform owners rely on to simultaneously foster generativity and control. Conducting a structured literature review, we connect the fragmented academic discourse on governance mechanisms with each aspect of the generativity-control tension. Next to providing avenues for prospective digital platform research, we elaborate on the double-sidedness of governance mechanisms in fostering both generativity and control

Governance Mechanisms in Digital Platform Ecosystems: Addressing the Generativity-Control Tension

Digital platform owners repeatedly face paradoxical design decisions with regard to their platforms’ generativity and control, requiring them to facilitate co-innovation whilst simultaneously retaining control over third-party complementors. To address this challenge, platform owners deploy a variety of governance mechanisms. However, researchers and practitioners currently lack a coherent understanding of what major governance mechanisms platform owners rely on to simultaneously foster generativity and control. Conducting a structured literature review, we connect the fragmented academic discourse on governance mechanisms with each aspect of the generativity-control tension. Next to providing avenues for prospective digital platform research, we elaborate on the double-sidedness of governance mechanisms in fostering both generativity and control

The Appleization of finance: Charting incumbent finance’s embrace of FinTech

The rise of financial technology (FinTech) engenders novel business models through integrating financial services and information and communication technologies (ICT). Digital currencies and payments, data mining, and other FinTech applications threaten to radically overhaul the financial sector. This article argues that, while we are becoming aware of how technology giants such as Apple Inc. are making inroads into financial services, we need to become more sensitive to how financial incumbents mimick ICT firms while aiming to neutralize the FinTech challenge. Practices from Silicon Valley are spilling over into ‘traditional’ finance through a process we dub Appleization. We illustrate how incumbents aim to remain indispensable amidst rapid digitization. Mimicking tech strategies, financial incumbents resort to transforming legacy ICT systems into integrated platforms, cultivating entrepreneurial ecosystems where startups are ‘free’ to compete whilst effectively being locked into the incumbent's orbit. We illustrate this by comparing Apple’s business features (locking-in developers, customers and state into a hybrid business model based on a synergy between hardware, software and data-driven platform components) with emerging practices in the financial industry. Our analogy suggests that the Appleization of finance might radically transform, yet not undercut the oligopolistic position of financial incumbents

Platformization of Urban Life: Towards a Technocapitalist Transformation of European Cities

The increasing platformization of urban life needs critical perspectives to examine changing everyday practices and power shifts brought about by the expansion of digital platforms mediating care-services, housing, and mobility. This book addresses new modes of producing urban spaces and societies. It brings both platform researchers and activists from various fields related to critical urban studies and labour activism into dialogue. The contributors engage with the socio-spatial and normative implications of platform-mediated urban everyday life and urban futures, going beyond a rigid techno-dystopian stance in order to include an understanding of platforms as sites of social creativity and exchange

Platformization of Urban Life

The increasing platformization of urban life needs critical perspectives to examine changing everyday practices and power shifts brought about by the expansion of digital platforms mediating care-services, housing, and mobility. This book addresses new modes of producing urban spaces and societies. It brings both platform researchers and activists from various fields related to critical urban studies and labour activism into dialogue. The contributors engage with the socio-spatial and normative implications of platform-mediated urban everyday life and urban futures, going beyond a rigid techno-dystopian stance in order to include an understanding of platforms as sites of social creativity and exchange

Platformization of Urban Life

The increasing platformization of urban life needs critical perspectives to examine changing everyday practices and power shifts brought about by the expansion of digital platforms mediating care-services, housing, and mobility. This book addresses new modes of producing urban spaces and societies. It brings both platform researchers and activists from various fields related to critical urban studies and labour activism into dialogue. The contributors engage with the socio-spatial and normative implications of platform-mediated urban everyday life and urban futures, going beyond a rigid techno-dystopian stance in order to include an understanding of platforms as sites of social creativity and exchange