Umeå universitets logga

Past decades have seen business platforms proliferate not only as a means to collaborate, but also decrease time-to-market and promote innovation. However, extant literature tends to dichotomise platforms, perceiving them as either strategic resources or technical systems. Applied to digital platforms, we argue that options theory offers a potential means to reconcile the operand and operant perspectives of platform artefacts. We illustrate our point via a case study of a firm that has gradually developed a product that enables mobile communication into a digital platform that provides a wide range of customers with services from several different suppliers. This study contributes to our understanding of digital platforms as it describes how design choices by a provider can affect flexibility and continued development of new services.

Faced with an environment of technological uncertainties, software platforms have gained interest as an enabler of innovative businesses and development processes. Extant research is however largely limited to studies that explore the benefits of mature platforms. Considerably less is known regarding the establishment of platforms. Drawing inspiration from a life-cycle perspective, the purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual model for software platform establishment based on entrepreneurial alertness. We develop a framework based on entrepreneurial alertness that describes four types of awareness: market, resources, technology, and context. Based on a qualitative case study of an emerging platform, we contribute to literature on platform strategy by studying entrepreneurial behavior during the establishment of a software platform. Our study indicates that all four types of awareness are necessary in order to market a platform to customers and attract 3rd party interest.

The Internet of Things (IoT) creates a myriad of new business opportunities that focus on collecting, transmitting, and analyzing product data. IoT collaborations bring together diverse firms with separate skill-sets that both produce and utilize digitized data to co-create value. While previous research has explored the technical implications of IoT in great detail, it has largely ignored the business implications of such endeavors. In this paper, we focus on the early stages of the emerging inter-organizational relationships that IoT enables and ask the question: How can the inter-organizational dynamics between disparate actors in an IoT ecosystem be perceived and understood? By conducting a qualitative case study and tracing four types of organizational boundaries: efficiency, power, competence and identity, we show how firm boundaries are emergent, dynamic, and constantly negotiated between firms. Allowing for and understanding this relational interplay is crucial in order for IoT ecosystems to thrive and grow.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid emergence of digital technology as not just an enabler, but indeed a material basis for platform development. However, extant platform literature does not adequately address strategies related to digital platforms. Specifically, the notion of platform coring does not consider how a core is to be identified or the nature of a core in relation to entangled physical and digital materiality. This paper presents a single-case study of a digital platform for business-to-business services. Results suggest that rather than a specific platform element, the core of a digital platform may be described as a capability to harness the potential of digital technology. Furthermore, platform coring may be aided by adopting value propositions as a means to conceptualize the process of negotiating mutual benefit among platform stakeholders. This study contributes to the understanding of digital platform establishment as it addresses the notion of coring and the emergent process related to the distributed ontology of digital technology and a situated perception of value.