Challenges to Co-Creating Value in Nascent Platform Ecosystems: Gaps Between Theory and Practice

ABSTRACT

Digital platform ecosystems have formed profitable centers of gravity over the past decade. However, in several areas, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), the platform business is still in its infancy. Moreover, platform ventures are now failing at an alarming rate. The nexus for the success or failure of platforms often lies in the early stages of platform development. Value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems is subject to specific challenges that impede platform success. Today, the literature on nascent platform ecosystems is fragmented and in a nascent stage as well, making in-depth theoretical discourse and useful managerial implications difficult. Therefore, we first conduct a comprehensive literature review through the theoretical lens of service innovation for nascent digital platforms to highlight today’s research foci. Next, we identify the main gaps between the academic literature and practical interest in nascent platform ecosystems through a Delphi study with 21 experts from leading IoT organizations. Through our finding we reveal five gaps where managerial interest is strong but theory is lacking from the discourse on nascent platform ecosystems: fear of lock-in, fear of an overly dominant platform, designing for trust, identifying the right partners, and a common language. In doing so, we provide important orientation to guide future theoretical work toward impactful management implications. Beyond that, we present a research framework and agenda that take into account the dynamic aspects of emerging platform ecosystems and thus complement existing theoretical foundations.

KEYWORDS AND PHRASES:

• Nascent platform ecosystems
• digital platforms
• digital ecosystems
• platform ecosystems
• value co-creation
• Internet of things

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2024.2332046.

Notes

1 The list of identified challenges was presented at the International Conference on Information Systems and included in the conference proceedings (see [34]). This article builds on the respective work in line with the policies and guidelines of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) for publishing conference papers in AIS journals.

2 For reasons of simplicity and readability, we refer to platform and ecosystem, as opposed to service platform and service ecosystem.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Florian Hawlitschek

Florian Hawlitschek ([email protected]; corresponding author) is an affiliated researcher at the Chair of Trust in Digital Services in the Faculty of Economics and Management at Technical University Berlin. He is a strategic innovation manager in a German insurance company and has previous professional experience in waste management and the automotive industry (Bosch). His research has been published in Business & Information Systems Engineering, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Group Decision and Negotiation, MIS Quarterly Executive, and Journal of Cleaner Production, among other outlets.

Daniel Hodapp

Daniel Hodapp ([email protected]) is a manager in EY’s Strategy and Transaction practice, focusing on the transformation of the automotive industry toward software-defined vehicles. He completed an integrated Ph.D. program at the University of Göttingen while previously working for Bosch, studying the driving forces behind digital platform ecosystems. Dr. Hodapp’s research has been published in the Journal of Information Technology, MIS Quarterly Executive, and the Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems.