Open innovation, information, and entrepreneurship within platform ecosystems

Abstract

Research Summary Companies sponsor platform ecosystems as an open innovation strategy to encourage complementors to develop complementary products, services, or technologies that can add value to the platform ecosystem. In this study, we develop and test an information‐based theory of entrepreneurial activity within platform ecosystems. We postulate that ecosystems produce different types of information—a subset of which will foster entrepreneurship in the form of the commercialization of complementary products that were previously released for free. Our results indicate that product‐specific information is associated with commercialization, but we fail to detect a relationship between market information and subsequent commercialization activity. Managerial Summary The digital economy has led to a proliferation of platform ecosystems that harness external innovation. These ecosystems rely on complementors who enhance the value of platforms by creating complementary technologies. Hence, complementors' commercial viability is important. One such type of ecosystem is an app store, which enables complementors to introduce software that improves the platform product. App stores exist for a variety of software platforms, ranging from mobile phone operating systems (iOS and Android) to electronic medical record systems (Epic and Cerner). In this research, we find that complementors who introduce a free version of a mobile app are more likely to commercialize their app in response to specific types of information and platform designers should manage information in their platforms to foster platform viability.

On open innovation, platforms, and entrepreneurship

“…Such digital platforms have changed the underlying economics of establishing a start‐up (capable of “disrupting” existing firms and/or creating new markets or reforming old ones) by lowering its initial technological barriers and market risks (Zysman & Kenney, ). As Eckhardt, Ciuchta, and Carpenter (, this issue) show, digital platforms not only constitute a basis for entrepreneurial activity, but also facilitate deploying a graduated risk approach toward venturing. The authors demonstrate how innovators developed and uploaded apps to the Blackberry platform and then, based on technology and market signals received from the platform ecosystem, converted them to paid applications.…”

Reviewing the Domain of Technology and Innovation Management: A Visualizing Bibliometric Analysis

“…TIM scholars begin to examine the complex process of innovation. For example, both open innovation and business model innovation stress the collaboration among a variety of partners, which are sometimes treated as ecosystems (Eckhardt, Ciuchta, & Carpenter, 2018;Martins, Rindova, & Greenbaum, 2015). Thus, the research objects should be changed from individual firms to the ecosystems, and some new theories and perspectives should be employed to explain the new phenomena.…”

Digital and Conventional Matchmaking – Similarities, Differences and Tensions

“…Ecosystems include a wide array of heterogeneous actors such as partnering firms, communities, third-party innovators, government agencies, social movements etc. The literature contains different classes of ecosystems, for example; business ecosystems [39], innovation ecosystems [1,11], digital ecosystems [53] and platform ecosystems [16,59]. Relationships in ecosystems are characterized by interdependency [31] with no clear distinction of competition and collaboration [5].…”