Unpacking platform business scaling in the digital age

Today’s increasingly pervasive digital technologies have radically transformed the competition landscape of the business world. To succeed in the digital age, digital businesses must establish and strengthen their ecosystem positions through rapid scaling. While extant literature in platform ecosystems identified the urgency of scaling for focal platforms, there is little recognition that non-focal actors (i.e., complementors) typically pursue their own growth ambitions. If successful, these ambitions may even shift the complementor’s position as a non-focal to a focal actor in the digital ecosystem. While such a scaling process opens new possibilities for the complementor, it also challenges its relations with focal platforms in the ecosystem on which it depends. This is what we refer to as the complementor’s dilemma: how can a non-focal actor pursue growth ambitions while maintaining favourable relationships with the focal platforms on which they grow? To address this research problem, a sequential mixed-method project combining qualitative research approaches with computational techniques was conducted. Developing on an in-depth embedded case study of the Chinese short video platform Douyin from its inception as a complementor in 2016 to its rapid establishment as a focal actor in 2018, we further test and generalise the findings for the entire social networking ecosystem in China. This allows for new empirical and theoretical perspectives on the navigation process of digital business scaling through identity projection. The findings suggest that non-focal businesses must continually locate and re-locate who they are in the moment and the trade-off of two, or multiple, future scenarios regarding their relationship with focal platforms, to cope with the complementor’s dilemma as they grow. Four identity projection strategies are further conceptualised as a powerful toolkit for balancing growth ambitions and dependency on other ecosystem actors during the scaling process. These findings contribute to the platform literature by offering a process model for non-focal businesses’ identity projection as they grow in digital ecosystems. The model offers important implications for our understanding of complementarity as a dynamic process involving purposeful identity re-projection, as non-focal businesses attempt to navigate tensions with focal platforms in digital ecosystems during growth. It also contributes to our understanding of digital business scaling beyond a high-growth consequence of firm size — a turbulent, uncertain, messy process to economies of complementarity in digital ecosystems