Today, innovating with a user community seems an effective strategy for developing a firm's innovation capacity. However, short-term benefits from this collaboration are no longer sufficient, and firms are now looking to develop a sustainable relationship with users, to maintain sustainable innovation. This study furthers our understanding of the way in which a user toolkit connected to a community serves to manage innovation of an existing product or service. The literature provides a limited understanding of the role of a user toolkit in the management of a sustainable innovation approach in firms. The research is based on a longitudinal case study of the video game Trackmania, which has an integrated toolkit connected to a large and active user community. Results confirm the crucial role of the toolkit in the construction, control and maintenance of a sustainable innovative approach with a user community. From the innovation perspective, the toolkit can be considered as a means of managing the boundary between the firm and the user community, because it enables the community to structure itself as a multi-sided platform, where all categories of users participate in value creation. Finally, we identify four modalities for managing sustainable innovation with a user community toolkit.

To cite this version:Romain Gandia, Guy Parmentier. Optimizing value creation and value capture with a digital multisided business model. Strategic Change, Wiley, 2017, 26 (4) Faced with the limits of cooperative approaches to business model in optimizing the value creation and value capture, we propose here a new multi-sided business model architecture adapted to digital industries which allows considering new opportunities to create and capture value, for the growth and survival of innovative SMEs.

Purpose This study aims to examine the way to develop a multi-sided logic for existing business models. More precisely, the objective is to find rules for designing a multi-sided business model from a one-sided business model. Design/methodology/approach Given that business model (BM) literature and multi-sided literature do not address the complex issue of multi-sided business model design, the authors propose here a set of six redesign operations. These operations are built from a comprehension of the development and evolution of multi-sided platforms and their consequences for business model architecture. Several empirical cases illustrate each operation. Findings A process of business model redesign is proposed with three phases: setting-up a technological digital platform to support the multi-sided architecture, identifying and engaging several customer groups on the platform and linking the customer groups and structuring the revenue model. This process details the chronological order in which the redesign operations can be implemented to build a multi-sided BM. Practical implications The importance of the stage of semi-finished development of the platform, the openness of digital content, reaching the critical threshold and the combination of a dual economic model (free/paid) is highlighted. For managers, this provides better practices to successfully manage the business model redesign process. Originality/value This paper helps managers in companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, to profit from a multi-sided business model by proposing a way to achieve it.

This article identifies barriers that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) encounter when they openly innovate, according to the open innovation (OI) mode used (inbound, outbound, coupled). A qualitative analysis—involving seven case studies of SMEs active in digital (high-tech) or social economy (low-tech) sectors—reveals that they face more internal than external OI barriers. Overall, the nature of the barriers does not vary across OI modes, but their intensity does. With regard to external barriers, the results reveal a “tribe syndrome,” such that SMEs resist opening up to other firms that do not share the same values.

Recent studies call for reconsideration of the predictions of resource dependence theory, in light of contemporary industrial and economic environments. This study accordingly investigates the influence of dependence on the strategic choice to innovate by focusing on a rarely studied topic, namely, the sources of dependence. In studying small and medium‐sized video game enterprises, this paper provides empirical validation of dependence phenomena. These companies have limited resources, which inevitably creates dependence, exacerbated in innovative contexts because of the prevalence of negative effects, such as opportunism, abuse of power, limited innovation, or inequitable distributions of economic value. To deal with these negative effects, some enterprises use cooperation or integration strategies to try to minimize their dependence. The strategic choice then might be conditioned. The results of a comparative and qualitative study of five video game developers show that a lack of resources and skills is the primary source of dependence. In addition, a hierarchy of sources of dependence seems to guide the strategic choices of developers to innovate.

Le concept d'innovation ouverte connaît un succès grandissant. Toutefois, les risques sont nombreux et importants, notamment en ce qui concerne les difficultés de maîtrise et de valorisation des droits de propriété attachés à l'innovation collaborative. La littérature tend à montrer qu'il existe une relation négative entre le niveau d'ouverture du processus d'innovation et la détention des droits de propriété liés à l'innovation. Toutefois, elle ne précise ni le type de collaboration, ni la nature des partenaires. Cet article a précisément pour objectif de montrer que le type de collaboration et la nature du partenaire ont un impact sur le sens de cette relation. Le secteur du jeu vidéo est particulièrement adapté à cette problématique car le processus d'innovation y est fragmenté et le régime de propriété encore mal défini. Au travers de l'étude de cinq studios, nous mettons en évidence que l'ouverture du processus d'innovation par une collaboration fermée avec des partenaires du secteur implique une relation négative entre niveau d'ouverture et détention des droits de propriété intellectuelle. A l'inverse, une collaboration ouverte sur des communautés d'utilisateurs conduit à un lien positif.

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La révolution numérique est un levier pour la création de nouveaux business models ouverts sur internet. Toutefois, l’ouverture reste complexe à mettre en œuvre dans une architecture traditionnelle de business model car elle implique des risques et contraintes difficiles à gérer. Dans cette perspective, nous mobilisons la littérature sur les plateformes multifaces et deux études de cas dans le jeu vidéo en ligne pour proposer une architecture multiface, plus adaptée à la gestion de l’ouverture. En créant des faces complémentaires sur la proposition de valeur mais interdépendantes sur la création et la capture de valeur, il est possible d’ouvrir une partie du business model, pour accéder aux bénéfices de l’ouverture tout en limitant ses contraintes.