Abstract. Digital platforms can be opened in two ways to promote innovation and value generation. A platform owner can open access for third-party participants by establishing boundary resources, such as APIs and an app store, to allow complements to be developed and shared for the platform. Furthermore, to foster cooperation with the complementors, the platform owner can use an open-source license boundary resource to open and share the platform's core resources. However, openness that is too wide renders the platform and its shared resources vulnerable to strategic exploitation. To our knowledge, platform strategies that promote such negative outcomes have remained unexplored in past research. We identify and analyze a prominent form of strategic exploitation called platform forking in which a hostile firm, i.e., a forker, bypasses the host's controlling boundary resources and exploits the platform's shared resources, core and complements, to create a competing platform business. We investigate platform forking on Google's Android platform, a successful open digital platform, by analyzing the fate of five Android forks and related exploitative activities. We observe several strategies that illustrate alternative ways of bundling a platform fork from a set of host, forker, and other resources. We also scrutinize Google's responses, which modified Android's boundary resources to curb exploitation and retain control. In this paper, we make two contributions. First, we present a theorization of the competitive advantage of open digital platforms and specifically expose platform forking as an exploitative and competitive platform strategy. Second, we extend platform governance literature by showing how boundary resources, which are mainly viewed as cooperative governance mechanisms, are also used to combat platform forking and thus sustain a platform's competitive advantage.

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There are an increasing number of information sources and services around us enabling new ways of interacting with our everyday environment. Examples include intelligent devices, sensors embedded in the environment and the emerging Internet-of-Things. Simultaneously users are becoming increasingly involved as information providers and consumers by means of Web 2.0 and social media. While these areas have gained a lot of attention recently and while the research on Digital Ecosystems has also dealt with these phenomena separately there seems to be need for research on the rich and complex ecosystem combining the sensor-based information sources with Web 2.0 and mobile services. In this paper, we propose a Digital Ecosystem architecture, which combines the social media and Internet-of-Things. The architecture is the fruit from the international collaboration between two long-term university Living Lab projects in Finland and in China. It aims at fostering student innovations in their everyday campus lives. We discuss the experiences learnt in the context of this international collaboration and the implications to Digital Ecosystem research.

In recent years, we have seen the rise of Web 2.0, in which users become co-creators and software turns into services. During the last two years, we have also witnessed the phenomenal success of Apple’s App Store for which people produce the applications and can also create  business of them. While the technologies and business services related to these phenomena have been studied separately, we suggest that the underlying digital ecosystem that ties them together has not been made explicit. In this paper, we provide a conceptual model of a digital ecosystem for understanding how companies can co-create business with people. To construct such a model, we use multiple case study approach and explore two cases: an ecosystem around smart phone application market App Store and an ecosystem around bioinformatics service registry BioCatalogue. Our results suggest that the required technical solutions and business services are now available. However, to make business flourish, the orchestration of the overall ecosystem is also essential and needs to be taken care of.

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In recent years, we have seen the rise of Web 2.0, where users become co-creators and software turns into services. While Web 2.0 technologies and concepts have been studied separately, we suggest that the digital ecosystem they form together and the ways in which users interact with it in social contexts have not been made explicit. In this paper, we provide a conceptual model of a community and a digital ecosystem for boosting user-driven service business. To construct such a model, we first identify the key actors and their interactions by applying use case modelling. Based on that, conceptual modelling is used to sketch an illustrative model of the overall ecosystem. Finally, we use the field of bioinformatics to evaluate the model and to propose ideas for boosting user-driven service business in that field as well.