We study platform owner's decision to enter the market complementary to its platform with its own complement, and the consequences of such an entry on complementors' decision to innovate in the affected market category. We ask: if a platform owner like Google releases an app for its Android platform, does it keep app developers from innovating in the future? We investigate two mechanisms that suggest entry to stimulate complementary innovation. A racing mechanism, which prompts affected complementors to innovate due to competitive "Red Queen" dynamics, and an attention spillover mechanism, which suggests increased innovation to result from spillover consumer attention to same-category complements. We exploit a unique setting provided by Google's entry into the market for photography apps on its own Android platform in 2015 as a quasi-experiment. Whereas several models predict such an entry will erode complementors' incentives to innovate, our difference-indifferences analyses of time-series data on a random sample of 6,620 apps suggest the contrary. After entry, app developers were more likely to incrementally innovate their photography apps and to release new apps to the affected market category. Although we do not observe a racing effect, our analyses support the attention spillover effect. In other words, Google's entry created additional consumer attention and demand for photography apps, which spill over to complementors in the same category.
Achieving effective inter-team coordination is one of the most pressing challenges in large-scale software development. Hybrid approaches of traditional and agile development promise combining the overview and predictability of longterm planning on inter-team level with the flexibility and adaptability of agile development on team level. It is currently unclear, however, why such hybrids often fail. Our case study within a large software development unit of 13 teams at a global enterprise software company explores how and why a combination of traditional planning on inter-team level and agile development on team level can result in ineffective coordination. Based on a variety of data, including interviews with scrum masters, product owners, architects and senior management, and using Grounded Theory data analysis procedures, we identify a lack of dependency awareness across development teams as a key explanation of ineffective coordination. Our findings show how a lack of dependency awareness emerges from misaligned planning activities of specification, prioritization, estimation and allocation between agile team and traditional inter-team levels and ultimately prevents effective coordination. Knowing about these issues, large-scale hybrid projects in similar contexts can try to better align their planning activities across levels to improve dependency awareness and in turn achieve more effective coordination.
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