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

Governance of Visibility Platform

A real-time transportation visibility platform develops its network by adding successive complementors. The governance mechanism benefits the platform owner the most and creates asymmetries among platform members. These asymmetries trigger coopetition tensions between governance costs and co-created value, autonomy, and control. Resolving tensions between complementors and real-time visibility platform provider is a key for the successful performance of a real-time visibility transportation platform. The fee share and bonus malus scheme should balance the asymmetries of benefits from being part of a real-time visibility transportation platform

Compatibility promotion for standard development within shared platforms:A rising tide does not lift all boats

Selective promotion entails the exploitation of resources offered by individual complementors to improve a proprietary platform’s competitive position. However, as governance decisions to endorse a particular complementor are made unilaterally, such promotion is less suitable for shared platforms that are ultimately owned and managed by an ecosystem of heterogeneous, autonomous complementors. We explore compatibility promotion, which involves screening a shared stock of infrastructural resources and making a choice as to which complementor to promote in light of the capabilities the platform seeks to develop. Based on a longitudinal study of a shared platform that evolved around a new technology standard in the Swedish road haulage industry, we explicate how elevating one complementor over others unsettled the governance of the platform and denied the promoted complementors the opportunity to generate the kind of value that their elevated status implicitly promised. This made the platform better off at the expense of the promoted complementor. Our surprising insight lets us theorize why compatibility promotion in shared platforms renders outcomes opposite to those of selective promotion in proprietary platforms.</p

Towards a Self-Organizing Digital Business Ecosystem: Examining IT-Enabled Boundary Spanning Practice of China’s LeEco

The emergence of digital business platforms, ecosystems and non-linear value chains fosters hyper-connections among human actors, organizations, and processes. Such digital moves have brought cross-industry convergence and the blurring of business ecosystem boundaries, bringing about the possibility of overlapping business ecosystems, generating complex socio-technical issues. In this research-in-progress paper, we unpack the processes of how China’s LeEco develop from an emergent digital platform to a self-organizing digital business ecosystem. Drawing on theoretical notions of boundary spanning practice, we posit that towards a self-organizing digital business ecosystem, managers must seek to instill a conducive environment that reinforces, reciprocates and reproduces digital infrastructure through organizational coalition, congruence and hybridity respectively. Towards theoretical and practitioner contributions, ongoing analysis seeks to unpack the process of managing overlapping digital business ecosystems, the conditions under which they operate, the role of digital infrastructure in transition across organizational forms, the implications and outcomes

Digital Platform Establishment: Navigating Competing Concerns in Emerging Ecosystems

Digital Platforms impose organizing logics on ecosystems. Dependent on their configuration, they enable certain practices, relationships, and value distribution among actors while preventing alternatives. Incumbent platforms often have a strong power to implement contested configurations since they control access to attractive user groups/markets. However, emerging platforms have a small degree of bargaining power in relation to key actors since they have not yet achieved such a position. Although numerous studies detail governance strategies for incumbent platform ecosystems, research on how platform providers navigate competing concerns in emerging platform ecosystems remain rare. We report on a study of the establishment and continuous dynamics of a digital platform used for service innovation. We inductively identify a pattern of the dynamics in this navigation process, locate four salient tensions driving these dynamics, and provide insights on how the platform provider navigated them

Smartphone chronic gaming consumption and positive coping practice

Purpose: Chronic consumption practice has been greatly accelerated by mobile, interactive and smartphone gaming technology devices. This study explores how chronic consumption of smartphone gaming produces positive coping practice. Design/methodology/approach: Underpinned by cognitive framing theory, empirical insights from eleven focus groups (n=62) reveal how smartphone gaming enhances positive coping amongst gamers and non-gamers. Findings: The findings reveal how the chronic consumption of games allows technology to act with privileged agency that resolves tensions between individuals and collectives. Consumption narratives of smartphone games, even when play is limited, lead to the identification of three cognitive frames through which positive coping processes operate: (a) the market generated frame, (b) the social being frame, and (c) the citizen frame. Research limitations/implications: This paper adds to previous research by providing an understanding of positive coping practice in the smartphone chronic gaming consumption. Originality/value: In smartphone chronic gaming consumption, cognitive frames enable positive coping by fostering appraisal capacities in which individuals confront, hegemony, culture and alterity-morality concerns

Ecosystem synergies, change and orchestration

This thesis investigates ecosystem synergies, change, and orchestration. The research topics are motivated by my curiosity, a fragmented research landscape, theoretical gaps, and new phenomena that challenge extant theories. To address these motivators, I conduct literature reviews to organise existing studies and identify their limited assumptions in light of new phenomena. Empirically, I adopt a case study method with abductive reasoning for a longitudinal analysis of the Alibaba ecosystem from 1999 to 2020. My findings provide an integrated and updated conceptualisation of ecosystem synergies that comprises three distinctive but interrelated components: 1) stack and integrate generic resources for efficiency and optimisation, 2) empower generative changes for variety and evolvability, and 3) govern tensions for sustainable growth. Theoretically grounded and empirically refined, this new conceptualisation helps us better understand the unique synergies of ecosystems that differ from those of alternative collective organisations and explain the forces that drive voluntary participation for value co-creation. Regarding ecosystem change, I find a duality relationship between intentionality and emergence and develop a phasic model of ecosystem sustainable growth with internal and external drivers. This new understanding challenges and extends prior discussions on their dominant dualism view, focus on partial drivers, and taken-for-granted lifecycle model. I propose that ecosystem orchestration involves systematic coordination of technological, adoption, internal, and institutional activities and is driven by long-term visions and adjusted by re-visioning. My analysis reveals internal orchestration's important role (re-envisioning, piloting, and organisation architectural reconfiguring), the synergy and system principles in designing adoption activities, and the expanding arena of institutional activities. Finally, building on the above findings, I reconceptualise ecosystems and ecosystem sustainable growth to highlight multi-stakeholder value creation, inclusivity, long-term orientation and interpretative approach. The thesis ends with discussing the implications for practice, policy, and future research.Open Acces

Ecological determinants of smart home ecosystems: A coopetition framework

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