Platforms as service ecosystems: Lessons from social media

Abstract

The growing business expansion of social media platforms is changing their identity and transforming the practices of networking, data and content sharing with which social media have been commonly associated. We empirically investigate these shifts in the context of TripAdvisor and its evolution since its very establishment. We trace the mutations of the platform along three stages we identify as search engine, social media platform and end-to-end service ecosystem. Our findings reveal the underlying patterns of data types, technological functionalities and actor configurations that punctuate the business expansion of TripAdvisor and lead to the formation of its service ecosystem. We contribute to the understanding of the current trajectory in which social media find themselves as well as to the literature on platforms and ecosystems. We point out the importance of services that develop as commercially viable and constantly updatable data bundles out of diverse and dynamic data types. Such services are essential to the making of the complementarities that are claimed to underlie ecosystem formation.

Co-evolution of platform architecture, platform services, and platform governance: Expanding the platform value of industrial digital platforms

“…Thus, the emergence of a platform ecosystem in the B2B context gradually unfolds through close collaboration between a platform sponsor, complementors, and customers (Enkel et al, 2020;Granstrand and Holgersson, 2020) as well as competing platforms (Adner et al, 2019). Moreover, functional contributions of actor-specific data are vital in the emergence of platform governance as they actively shape the platform growth (Alaimo et al, 2020). Therefore, there is a need to further understand the co-evolution of platform architecture and platform governance in the B2B context.…”

How Digital Platforms with a Social Purpose Trigger Change towards Sustainable Supply Chains

“…Propelled by increased efficiencies in social networks, demand aggregation, and app development, platforms can build a larger network that holds more value for the users [13]. Nevertheless, the strength of a network is predicated not only on its sheer size, but also on how meaningful and intense a connection is established between users [14]. The network structure does not only impact the speed at which a platform can reach scale, but also influences the organization's ability to sustain that scale.…”

Coordinating Digital Content Generation

“…In extant research, digital content generation has been more rigorously addressed from a social media perspective [28,32] that particularly emphasizes its affordances for social networking. In contrast, a digital platform perspective allows for understanding user-generated content as platform complements [2]-that is, externally generated resources-for fueling growth [24], diversity [7], and a continuously evolving digital platform architecture [36]. In the digital platform literature, there is a growing research interest in understanding "how governance and incentive structures can be best implemented to coordinate behavior across multiple platform stakeholders and their distinct interests" [10].…”

“…Such struggles can be understood as large-scale coordination of complement generators and their diverse interests and motives [10]. Surprisingly few studies have explored the distinct coordination challenges associated with digital content generation, although scholarly interest in digital content generation is growing [1,22,2,16]. While there are hierarchical interdependencies between different architectural layers of digital platforms (i.e., device, network, application, and content) [14,37], a holistic understanding of digital platforms requires distinct consideration within and across all layers [14], including the content layer.…”