Add-on Solution Success: A Configurational View on Knowledge Sharing in Digital Platforms

Digital platforms serve as a foundation upon which manifold firms develop complementary add-ons to address heterogeneous customer needs. In order to successfully stimulate partner contributions platform vendors need to share knowledge with partners that enables them to develop add-ons. Vendors face a trade-off between addressing idiosyncratic needs of partners while ensuring the scalability of knowledge sharing. Literature indicates that standardized or idiosyncratic knowledge sharing does not per se result in successful outcomes, but rather depends on how knowledge sharing addresses characteristics of the platform’s architecture. In order to increase our understanding of this trade-off we derive a typology of platform architecture and knowledge sharing. We conduct an empirical study at a large enterprise platform vendor to uncover configurations of knowledge sharing approaches. We distill successful knowledge sharing approaches following a set-theoretic approach. Our research in progress offers insights into our preliminary results and gives an outlook on our future research

Up in the cloud: Understanding the chasm between expectations and reality

CEOs increasingly demand their IT function to fully exploit the opportunities of cloud computing for their company. At the same time, we observe that employees make experiences with cloud services in their private life, which they seamlessly transfer and expect in the workplace - a phenomenon called cloud consumerization. Thereby, employees use self-deployed cloud services for solving business problems which they find more useful than the IT products provided by work. In light of these revolutionary changes, we propose that user experiences and outcomes are contingent on the process through which cloud services are adopted in companies. Systemizing cloud adoption as a continuum of top-down and bottom-up processes, we assume that adoption processes are distinct with respect to users’ social and governance context. In this paper, we outline the theoretical and methodological foundation, provide details on the expected theoretical contributions and give information regarding next steps of our research project

How cloud computing impacts stock market prices

Cloud computing is an evolution of computing technology and reflects a shift in the way it is delivered to businesses and individuals. Enterprises can significantly lower their cost of ownership, reduce time to value and faster adapt to changing needs in a globalized economy. Despite research and practice predict productivity increases and cost savings when migrating to the cloud one question remains unanswered: Does the adoption of cloud computing increase the market value of the firm? We try to answer this question by applying the event study methodology on companies that recently announced the deployment of cloud computing. Overall, we find significant positive abnormal returns. We find that investors specifically reward innovative and strategically motivated adoption of cloud computing. As a key implication of our results, we recommend in particular IT executives in large companies within the service industry to reassess their portfolio and foster the adoption of strategic and innovative cloud services

Self-Governance of Online Communities: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design

Using a novel identification strategy, we study whether and how users of online communities alter their behavior when they are appointed the highest position within a community, in terms of “moderators” who create and enforce governance policies. Our data comes from Stack Exchange, a network of more than 160 online communities, over the period from 2010 to 2017. These communities regularly hold democratic elections of moderators. By focusing on elections decided by a narrow vote margin, we can exploit a regression discontinuity that represents a quasi-random assignment of moderatorship. We find that moderatorship catalyzes desirable user behavior: closely elected moderators contribute more content to the community, which is also rated higher and bookmarked more often by other users. Rather than being the result of increased resources and tools granted by moderatorship, we observe that the effects are mostly driven by a psychological mechanism, in terms of increased community affiliation