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

Introduction

Value co-creation in digital platform ecosystems has emerged as an essential success factor for major players in various industries [17, 35]. It can be described as the process of ecosystem actors creating (digital) applications using platform modules [69]. Successful platforms encourage network externalities through involvement with digital technologies, thus becoming the compelling center of value co-creation [69]. Research on digital platforms for collaboration on a business-to-business (B2B) level has a long tradition in the context of electronic commerce (e.g., [10, 19, 41]). The same holds true for the concept of co-creation, which is frequently studied based on the notion of creation of value by consumers [105] and has recently gained new relevance in the context of the service-dominant logic [54]. Yet the rise of modern digital platforms and the Internet of Things (IoT) on a B2B level have created new challenges and opportunities beyond the consumer perspective [35, 106]. Thus, new strategies and practices to effectively manage value co-creation within digital platforms and ecosystems are urgently needed.

Running a platform business is a nontrivial task—building one from scratch and enabling value co-creation in the still nascent digital platform ecosystem is a real challenge. The nascent platform phase of a platform life cycle [89] is considered as a nexus for (i) the success or failure of generative platform activities [69], (ii) the unlocking of network externalities and thus dominance [12], and (iii) the enforcement of crucial design decisions that are often irreversible [99]. To differentiate nascent from mature platform ecosystems, we draw on the work of Teece [89], who introduced an ecosystem life cycle of four phases (birth, expansion, leadership, and self-renewal). While in the nascent birth phase generative sensing is required to design business models, the mature leadership phase focuses on strategic change from an established position [89]. Particular characteristics of the nascent stage of platform ecosystems according to Teece [89] are thus (i) entrepreneurs and/or managers are looking for profit through generative sensing, (ii) a business model (including value proposition, revenue model and cost model) needs to be identified, and (iii) initial boundaries of the platform and the firm need to be decided to facilitate asset orchestration.

Still today, “platforms fail at an alarming rate” [103]. Yet while successes of mature platforms provided by companies such as Apple have drawn the attention of many researchers and are well studied in the information systems (IS) literature (e.g., [22]), significantly less academic work has focused on value co-creation at an early stage of platform dynamics [78]. Prominent examples for nascent digital platform ecosystems are located in the context of the (industrial) IoT [47–49, 60, 62]. The market of IoT platforms (also referred to as digital industrial platforms [60], or IIoT platforms [47, 62, 65, 74] is fragmented and in an immature state [49]. According to Teece [89], IoT platforms can be understood as an example of the nascent “birth” phase of digital platforms.

Surprisingly, previous theoretical and empirical research on the nascent state of the digital platform ecosystem is limited, outdated, fragmented across multiple research streams, including economics, IS, and organization and management, and often conducted with a degree of conceptual ambiguity [69].

To address this challenge, it is important not only to provide an up-to-date overview of relevant literature on the matter but also to sketch out strategic focal points for future research endeavours. In line with reference Dhillon et al. [13], we argue that in the fields of IS (and electronic commerce in particular) it is of utmost importance to consider the practical impact of current research. Thus, integrating the perspective of practitioners into the development of a future research agenda is key. Platform managers and practitioners who meet the challenges of nascent platforms in their everyday work can contribute to a deeper understanding of the nascent platform phase and point to important gaps between theoretical and practical views on the matter. These gaps provide important cornerstones for strategic focus in future research [13]. Within the scope of this study, we therefore ask the following research question:

RQ: What are the gaps between theoretical and practical views on the challenges of nascent platform ecosystems?

We address the research question by first conducting a comprehensive literature review in the IS research domain. To consolidate and connect relevant studies, we introduce the well-established Service Innovation Framework by Lusch and Nambisan [44] as a structural lens for our review. We enrich the framework by relevant literature from the research field of digital platforms to account for the aspect of “digitality” [69], which plays a particularly important role in the context of the IoT. We extend the findings of our literature review by adding an external practitioners’ perspective. To do so, we conduct an exploratory Delphi study with 21 executives from leading IoT companies.¹ Also for this second approach, we draw on the Service Innovation Framework [44] to create a structured and comprehensive list of relevant challenges in this important domain. By integrating the practitioners’ view on the challenges through the same structural lens, we are able to derive the most relevant gaps between theoretical and practical views on nascent platform ecosystems as a fundament for a proposed research agenda. In doing so, we follow the lead of Dhillon et al. [13] by reducing the “gap between academic literature and practitioner interests” (p. 9).

Our contribution to theory on nascent platform ecosystems is threefold: First, we contribute to the cumulative body of literature on nascent digital platforms through a systematic literature review. Second, we provide strong guidance for impactful practical research by highlighting the gaps between what managers of nascent platforms are most interested in and what the literature has to offer in this regard today. Finally, based on the proven theoretical foundation of Lusch and Nambisan’s [44] Service Innovation Framework and the notions of “digitality” [69] and “dynamics in relationship initiation” [14], we propose a research framework and agenda to address the identified gaps and advance theory on nascent digital platforms.

Furthermore, our work has important managerial implications, resulting from the identified set of relevant gaps between theoretical and practical views on nascent platform ecosystems, comprising challenges such as fear of lock-in, fear of an overly dominant platform, designing for trust, identification of the right partners, and common language. Practitioners need to be aware of such pitfalls in order to better navigate the early stages of platform dynamics and to develop adequate response strategies. Our article contributes to practitioners’ awareness of the various challenges that stand in the way of successful value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems and discusses possible means of addressing these. Thus, our study serves as a starting point for both researchers and practitioners to effectively address the most important challenges related to value co-creation in nascent digital platform ecosystems and complements existing perspectives on digital platforms for B2B collaboration and co-creation in the electronic commerce literature [10, 19, 54, 105].

Theoretical Background

The Service Innovation Framework as a Structural Lens on Value Co-Creation in Digital Platform Ecosystems

Given the manifold perspectives on value co-creation in platform ecosystems, current literature on the process emphasizes two key aspects: first, the importance of grounded theoretical frameworks for the organization and anchoring of novel knowledge, and second, explicitness regarding the specific forms in which digital technologies shape innovation [53]. In the following, we address both aspects by introducing the Service Innovation Framework by Lusch and Nambisan [44] with a particular focus on the aspect of “digitality” [69]. “Digitality” is an important aspect of digital platforms and accounts for a necessary technology focus beyond organizational arrangements [69]. Especially in the broader management literature, this focus is often insufficiently developed [69]. While the concept still lacks a solid theoretical foundation, it is generally applicable to various platform specific domains such as matching, contacting, and executing and is considered a theoretically relevant cornerstone for digital platform research [69, 72, 98]. The Service Innovation Framework is a particularly good fit to study digital platform ecosystems, as each of its dimensions addresses different issues and concepts related to platforms [32]. It is often used as a fundament in related research domains and is thus well suited as a theoretical lens for providing structure for a fragmented field, as well as for contributing to the current body of knowledge [31, 32, 42, 85, 87]. We enrich the structural lens of Service Innovation with insights from information systems (IS) research on digital platforms and ecosystems to account for the aspect of “digitality” [59, 69]. This is particularly necessary as Lusch and Nambisan’s [44] underlying framework works well to describe the general value of co-creation mechanisms in platform-enabled ecosystems, but falls short in integrating “digitality” concepts such as digital governance, openness versus control considerations, technological application interfaces, interoperability, and potential technological lock-in effects that are unique to a digital environment [69]. By aligning the framework with existing literature on digital platforms, we follow the steps of De Reuver et al.[83], Rolland et al. [72], and Wagner et al. [98] and provide a foundation for a focused analysis of value co-creation in nascent digital platform ecosystems (e.g., in the context of the IoT).

As depicted in Figure 1, the Service Innovation framework encompasses all necessary building blocks to describe value co-creation in platform ecosystems while reflecting the three important elements of ecosystem, platform, and value co-creation [34].² According to Lusch and Nambisan [44], the three elements “together capture all the different concepts and issues that underlie the broadened view of service innovation” (p.161).

Figure 1. The Service Innovation Framework [44] as a Structural Lens to Relevant Concepts From Digital Platform Literature According to Reference Hodapp et al. [34]

We refer to digital platform ecosystems as “self-adapted, self-contained systems of regularly loosely coupled economic and social actors” [45] organized around a platform [95]. Especially in digital platform ecosystems, the jointly created value manifests in digital services that are specific to a digital platform [69]. Lusch and Nambisan [44] introduce three issues for value co-creation in the ecosystems: First, the ecosystem needs to balance the need for both structural flexibility and structural integrity of the ecosystem so that actors can relatively easy enter and exit the platform ecosystem. In digital platform ecosystems, flexibility and integrity are provided via boundary resources such as software development kits (SDKs), which provide a set of tools and boilerplate codes that can be used by actors to create plug-and-play applications [21, 32]. Second, to foster value co-creation, platform ecosystems need to connect actors with different institutional logics [44], which are necessary for ensuring a coherent and shared world view, including assessment of opportunities and threats. In digital platform ecosystems, the associated shared world view is usually defined by the platform owner as an abstract statement about the common form of cooperation [36]. Third, ecosystems require an architecture of participation in order to provide the mechanisms for resources to be coordinated, integrated, and synchronized in a coherent way within the ecosystem [44]. In digital platform ecosystems a common architecture is provided via highly standardized infrastructure that ensures homogenization, editability, reprogrammability and distributedness of data [69, 104].

We refer to platform as “a modular structure […] that facilitates the interaction of actors and resources” in the platforms ecosystem of Lusch and Nambisan [44]. In particular, the digital notion of platforms (also called digital platforms, software platforms, or software-based platforms) implies a software core to which complementary modules can be added, contributed by organizations in ecosystems [95]. Thereby, a platform faces the issue of devising an appropriate modular architecture to enhance resource density [46]. Particularly, mature digital platforms have cultivated a set of core modules that complement the platform and serve as the sufficient basis for building digital applications [69]. Moreover, platforms need to define and implement rules of exchange, that is, to prescribe how actors/resources can interface with the platform. In digital platforms, such rules are operationalized via boundary resources providing a “lingua franca” among ecosystem actors. In particular, digital interfaces such as APIs ensure a defined structure through payloads and secure interfaces to the platform and the complementary modules [21]. Overall, the diverse interests occurring in platform usage require platform governance, including issues of platform control [95], pricing mechanisms [56], and trust building [37].

Finally, we refer to value co-creation as “the processes and activities that underlie” value creation between multiple actors within a platform ecosystem [44]. According to Lusch and Nambisan [44], there are three key areas of support to foster value co-creation in platform ecosystems: The first is connecting knowledge of different actor groups to foster interaction in the ecosystem—usually by means of rating systems or white papers in digital platform ecosystems [17]. Second, to embrace other actors in the ecosystem easier, the actors’ adoption of internal processes needs to be supported—for digital platforms triggered via bridging activities between platform owners and complementors, for example, via one-to-one assistance, technological coaching, and co-innovation activities [17]. Third, increasing the transparency of activities is necessary to, inter alia, reduce wrong expectations about the nature of the co-created value. For digital platform ecosystems, this transparency is either provided by marketplaces that offer a venue for exchanging applications in a transparent manner—for example, in mobile platform ecosystems [22]—or via some sort of licensing models—for example, in enterprise platform ecosystems [7].

Method for Theoretical Perspective: Literature Review

A Review on Value Co-Creation Challenges in Nascent Platform Ecosystems

IS research on value co-creation in nascent (digital) platform ecosystems can be regarded as a nascent stream of literature itself [60]. Even though there is a growing body of literature on value creation in nascent business ecosystems (e.g., [12]), the challenges associated with nascent digital platform-centric ecosystems are still scarcely addressed [55]. However, there is a fast proliferation of research concerning platform ecosystems, including nascent platform ecosystems for example in the context of the IoT (e.g., [76]). While IoT platforms have several idiosyncratic characteristics that are not necessarily relevant for other types of digital platforms (e.g., the aspects of B2B actors, the complexity resulting from various types of hardware that need to be integrated within the ecosystem, challenges of interoperability, etc.), they generally follow the logics of digital platforms and their ecosystems [47–49, 60, 62]. It is possible to gain relevant knowledge on other types of nascent digital platform ecosystems by studying IoT platforms—as long as the idiosyncrasies are not generalized. To put it in the words of Marheine et al. [48]: IoT platform ecosystems can be conceptualized as “a close relative of a digital platform and business ecosystem” and are thus considered an “interesting domain to learn more about the characteristics of complementors and platforms” [48].

In order to provide a comprehensive overview on the relevant state of theoretical IS knowledge on value co-creation in nascent (digital) platform ecosystems, we conducted a literature review covering the Senior Scholars’ Basket of Journals (“Basket of Eight”) and the AIS electronic library. With this approach, we complement existing work on digital industrial platforms [60]. In February 2022 we used both search strings “nascent platform” and “nascent digital platform” to extract an initial set of 26 IS articles (set A). We extended the search to Google Scholar, resulting in a list of 216 articles (set B). In order to include only high quality and IS relevant literature in our review, we decided to exclude conference and book contributions from set B. We furthermore reduced the number of articles in both sets by excluding doublets, and screening titles and abstracts, and excluding papers that followed no clear methodology (such as commentaries) or were in a state of research in progress. Our criteria of exclusion can be summarized as follows: (1) title and abstract convey no focus on platforms in an early stage of development, (2) the methodology is not described or is missing, and (3) the article is not finalized (research in progress). Throughout the screening process, we followed the in dubio pro reo principle. This resulted in a refined list of 15 articles. On these we performed a forward and backward search that resulted in six further relevant articles.

We reviewed this final list of 21 articles using the previously introduced framework of Lusch and Nambisian [44] as a structural lens, which facilitates a detailed view on challenges in nascent platform ecosystems along the three categories of ecosystem, platform, and value co-creation. In doing so, we located each identified challenge within the dimensions of structural flexibility/integrity, shared worldview, architecture of participation (for ecosystem), resource density, rules of exchange (for platform), interaction in ecosystem, internal processes, and transparency of activities (for value co-creation). Table 1 summarizes the existing literature on nascent digital platform ecosystems, highlighting specific challenges identified by the authors along the dimensions.

Table 1. Condensed Body of Knowledge on Challenges in Nascent Platform Ecosystems.

Challenges related to	Ecosystem			Platform		Value co-creation
	Structural flexibility /integrity	Shared worldview	Architecture of participation	Resource density	Rules of exchange	Interaction in ecosystem	Internal processes	Transparency of Activities
[52]	x		x	x	x			x
[95]	x		x
[33]	x
[55]		x	x		x
[48]		x			x
[50]		x				x	x	x
[78]		x					x	x
[4]		x
[97]				x
[61]				x
[62]				x
[9]					x
[65]					x
[64]					x
[16]							x
[25]							x
[26]							x
[32]			x		x	x
[49]							x
[51]							x
[74]							x
[77]								x
Manifestation in nascent state	Lack of structural integrity	Diverse world views	Liberalistic architectures of participation	Lack of (data-related) resources	Rules may limit exchange	Little perceived need for platform mediation	Internal processes do not fit to platform rules	No clear value capture “blueprint”
Condensed body of knowledge (& specific IoT insights)	Technological turbulences and unbounded innovation in separated ecosystems impede structural integrity (standards, platforms, devices, etc. are emerging in induvial ecosystems without common interfaces, leading to multi-complex innovation across horizontally and vertically organized ecosystems).	The ecosystem may lack a joint understanding of what the platform is providing to complementors, which is aggravated by diverse regulatory frameworks and organizational particularities. (In the IoT each ecosystem has a legacy structure that needs to be integrated into a shared world view, leading to friction.)	Coevolution of competing platforms with rapidly developing and sparsely documented architectures and governances that result in separated ecosystems. (Separated ecosystems in the IoT result in data silos.)	Resources—especially for data processing, privacy and security—are scarce. Ecosystems face a lack of generativity (Capabilities of IoT platforms are mainly limited to monitoring.)	A lack of incentives and satisfying boundary resources leads to rules with the character of a double-edged sword: While supporting onboarded developers by standardization, they may also serve as an obstacle for new developers to comply with the platform. (There is an open question of with which boundary resources actors in the IoT are best attracted and encouraged for engagement.)	The number of actors in nascent platform ecosystems is low, and relationships are already established on a personal level. Thus, the need for platforms might appear weak. (In the IoT there is a limited number of device producers that have already formed and established relationships, making platforms appear obsolete.)	Platform-based value creation and the required internal processes to leverage the underlying opportunities are not clear to actors. (In the IoT a diverse set of actor types are mixed and matched together. Hardware companies pose a particular lack of internal readiness to leverage platform opportunities.)	It is not clear how the created value can be deconstructed into tangible business models. (Particularly in the IoT the value creation contains several actors making it difficult to provide a clear outline how value is captured between the actors.)

Ecosystem

Regarding nascent platform ecosystems, the existing body of literature reveals a set of challenges regarding a lack of structural integrity, diverse worldviews, and liberalistic architectures of participation.

The lack of structural integrity in nascent platforms ecosystems relates to several phenomena. In particular, there is a general challenge of a coevolution of platform architecture, governance, and environmental factors [95]. At the same time the support of heterogeneous devices in a central platform [52] and a state of hyperfragmentation results in challenges to ensure interoperability—especially for nascent platforms in the IoT [33]. In summary, technological turbulences and unbounded innovation (i.e., multiple technologies coming to the market often unaligned) lead to uncontrolled evolution of separated ecosystems and thus a challenge to ensure integrity, given the high pressure for structural flexibility.

Beyond issues related to structural integrity, ecosystems are confronted with diverse worldviews among actors, inter alia manifesting in uncertainty in interfirm interaction [4] and complementors’ uncertainty, for example, regarding the relation of complementing partners to the platform owner and the further evolution of the platform [48]. Ofe and Sandberg [55], in this regard, describe challenges of platform providers to balance disparate actor interests (on control vs. design options) to attract first actors and to efficiently allocate resources for key actors accordingly. Against the backdrop of these interactor aspects, complying with market demand and local regulatory barriers [78] or the mere particularities of buying and selling processes in B2B exchange [50] add a further dimension to the diversity in existing worldviews. In summary, the existing literature reports a lack of actors’ understanding on what the platform is and will be providing, as well as a set of diverse regulatory frameworks and organizational particularities of ecosystem participants that impede the development of a shared worldview.

Further challenges identified in recent literature relate to the rather liberalistic architectures of participation for nascent platform ecosystems. Driven by the coevolution of platform architecture, governance, and environmental factors [95], ensuring stability of the platform, while actors devote few resources to track changes regarding platform adaptation poses a challenge for platform providers [55]. In the IoT domain, this manifests in data silos and the development of multiple platforms, inhibiting ecosystem formation [52]. Summing up, the coevolution of competing platforms with rapidly developing and sparsely documented architectures and governances results in separated ecosystems and provokes a multitude of liberalistic architectures of participation. That, particularly in an IoT environment, leads to a more complex standardization procedure [32].

Platform

Looking at nascent platforms, challenges relate to a lack of (data-related) resources, and rules that may limit exchange.

In particular, the lack of (data-related) resources may result in a limited generativity [61] and a focus on monitoring capabilities [62]. Notably, the challenge of overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem when few or no resources are available on the platform is considered essential in nascent platform ecosystems [97]. Mineraud et al. [52] furthermore discover that resources of nascent platforms such as the rather simple privacy policies and emerging technical architectures pose a challenge to ensuring data privacy and security, as well as processing and sharing.

Overall, resource density—especially for data processing, privacy and security—appear to be low. The challenging lack of (data-related resources) results in a corresponding lack of generativity.

Nascent platform ecosystems furthermore struggle with the aspect of rules (of exchange) that may limit exchange. In early phases of platform development, when actors may face a lack of incentives for participation [48], it is particularly challenging to attract actors and encourage engagement in the ecosystem [65], for example, by installing satisfying boundary resources for actors to create innovations and customer value [64]. At the same time, it is important to define constraints in the engagement of distributed actors that ensure service quality, while not overly reducing the quantity [55]. For example, a standardization of application interactions may work as a support for some developers [52], while for other contributors, such requirements in the early stage of market development may pose a challenge [9].

In sum, in the nascent stage of platform development, a lack of incentives and satisfying boundary resources bring forward rules with the character of a double-edged sword: While supporting onboarded developers by standardization, they may also serve as an obstacle for new developers to comply with the platform, resulting in a conflict of service quality versus quantity.

Value Co-Creation

Lastly, addressing the process of value co-creation, little perceived need for platform mediated interaction, a bad fit between internal process and platform rules, and an unclear value capture “blueprint” are challenges in nascent platform ecosystems.

Especially in the context of the IoT, where actors often have few already established business to business relationships, value co-creation can be challenging [50]. Given the rather small number of actors in the nascent platform ecosystem and the grown relationships among them, value co-creation on platforms may appear obsolete, resulting in little perceived need for platform mediated interaction.

Further challenges related to value co-creation lie in a bad fit between internal processes and platform rules. Especially for incumbent firms, it is necessary to build internal capabilities for platform ecosystems [49] and to learn the new rules of platform ecosystem strategy, which implies a certain need to cope with the hybridity between the core and the platform business and requires an investment in the internal readiness for platform ecosystems [25]. Finding a well-balanced hybrid strategy [74] and learning to balance the competitive core with the needs for cooperation are challenging for actors [50]—especially since often the capabilities that are necessary for success in a novel ecosystem are not clear to ecosystem actors [26]. For actors involved in value co-creation the pressure to learn quickly is strong and knowledge decays rapidly [16]. At the same time the budget for innovation outputs is particularly limited [78]. The resulting competitive situation requires strategic decisions on effective governance mechanisms [51].

Overall, platform-based value creation and the required internal processes to leverage the underlying opportunities are not clear to complementors. Especially, incumbent actors in the hardware business face a lack of internal readiness to leverage platform opportunities in the IoT.

Finally, value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems is impeded by the lack of a clear value capture “blueprint.” In nascent platform ecosystems, often value is not only co-created but may also be co-destructed [77]. Given the role of various actors in the formation of value, it is quite challenging to make value accountable based on appropriation mechanisms for profit distribution but also to provide knowledge and skills to ensure quality [32, 78]. Especially for value co-creation in the context of the IoT, specialized solutions for (B2B) customers cannot be easily monetized via the logics of an app store (as known from the B2C context). Thus, the means of offering and monetizing services via a marketplace are limited [52].

Summing up, it is often not clear how value creation can be localized, monetized, and finally deconstructed into tangible business models.

Our summary of the current theoretical body of knowledge on challenges in nascent platform ecosystems already provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners. However, in order to compare the perceived challenges in the existing literature with perceived challenges by practitioners, we conducted a Delphi study, which is described in the following.

Method for Practical Perspective: A Delphi Study Among Experts From Leading IoT Organizations

Since the purpose of our study is to identify and rank challenges for value co-creation in nascent digital platform ecosystems from a practitioner’s view and compare them with the current body of academic literature in order to identify gaps, we applied the Delphi technique. This approach is particularly useful, since it allows one to seek divergent opinions and experiences of practitioners and translate them to a reliable list of challenges, as well as to converge upon the challenges that are important for the practitioners [13]. The Delphi technique is a methodology for structuring a group communication so that the process is effective in allowing experts to deal with a complex problem [75]. In the following, we recapitulate the procedure of participant selection, as well as data collection and analysis, as described in [34].

Participant Selection

A Delphi study does not depend on a statistical sample that attempts to be representative, but rather on a group decision mechanism that requires qualified experts with a deep understanding of the issues at hand [57]. Against this background, we follow the guidelines of Kasi et al. [40] on how to identify and solicit qualified experts for nominal group interviews.

In line with previous research, we consider platform ecosystems for the IoT as an important instantiation of nascent digital platform ecosystems [34, 47–49, 52, 60, 62, 102]. In a first step, we identified organizations and respective experts within the IoT domain relevant to our research question. In particular, we focused on IoT platform managers and service developers dealing with value co-creation processes either from the platform owner or from the platform complementor side. We considered research and development, product and project management, and strategy and sales executives involved in the co-creation of services in platform ecosystems as potentially relevant to our study. We expected our panelists to have a minimum experience of at least 1 year in the IoT domain. Based on the selection criteria outlined earlier, we first contacted experts drawing on the authors’ personal networks—in particular, a list of industry contacts from the Big IoT Project, which is part of the EU Platform Initiative [15] and includes leading providers of IoT platforms. We also examined the websites, social media channels, and business-oriented networks of candidates and contacted them, considering whether their professional position and experience met our criteria. Overall, we contacted 151 potential candidates with a brief outline of the topic of the study and received a response rate of 14 percent. Following Singh et al. [79], we then applied the snowball sampling technique and asked candidates who were willing to participate for additional contacts. Our final panel consisted of 21 relevant experts. As depicted in Table A1 in the Appendix, the demographical composition of our panels reveals an average experience of 6.5 years particularly in dealing with the co-creation of services in IoT platform ecosystems. Most participants hold leading positions, including those of chief executive officer (CEO), chief technical officer (CTO), head of development, or senior analyst. In addition, almost half of our panelist organizations have a dual role in the value co-creation process, as both platform owners and service providers, further underlining their expertise for our Delphi study. In total, the panelists stem from 18 different organizations from Europe and the United States.

Data Collection and Analysis

We designed and conducted the Delphi study online (January–April 2018) in order to facilitate a short and efficient data collection [101] and distributed a link to our Web-based survey tool Typeform to each panelist. Both the questionnaire and the task description were pretested with four IoT researchers (who were not part of the expert panel) to avoid confusion and ambiguity. Following the approach of Schmidt [75], our survey comprised three different phases, summarized in Figure 2 and described in detail in the Appendix, including sample excerpt from the survey (Table A4).

Figure 2. Delphi Procedure Adapted From Schmidt [75]

Results

Challenges on Value Co-Creation in Nascent Digital Platform Ecosystems

The brainstorming phase of the Delphi study resulted in a list of 26 challenges associated with value co-creation of digital platform ecosystems. After analyzing dependencies between the individual challenges via structured coding procedures, we grouped them into eight dimensions and anchored them in the categories of the Service Innovation Framework [44]. The description provided by the panelists supported the process. Ultimately, we summarize the challenges resulting from the brainstorming phase, the corresponding dimensions, and service innovation categories in Table 2 and sent them back to the panel to review [75].

Table 2. Challenges in Nascent Platform Ecosystems Identified by a Panel of IoT Experts.

		Challenges
Ecosystem		Structural flexibility/integrity
	a	Reducing perceived anxiety of customers and partners regarding potential lock-in effects by building on open interface standards for improved interoperability
	b	Integrating legacy technologies (e.g., existing sensors and machines) seamless into IoT platforms
		Shared worldview
	c	Aligning strategic interests and know-how of diverse players within the platform ecosystem to a common goal (e.g., customer problem)
	d	Recognizing the need of complementary partnerships in the ecosystem against the backdrop of own resource and capability limitations
	e	Agreeing on deployment countries and complying with different local and global legal/regulatory frameworks in the joint service creation process
		Architecture of participation
	f	Balancing creative and agile development methods with sustainable IT governance to ensure the reusability of IoT services in the platform ecosystem
	g	Moving toward a service creation on an overarching data level instead of dealing with the peculiarities of each underlying device and network
Platform		Resource density
	h	Developing scalable architectures to handle huge amounts of device data (e.g., data volume, storage, processing, provisioning and access)
	i	Evolving small-scale service demonstrators (e.g., proof of concepts, prototypes) efficiently and systematically into scalable platform services
	j	Refining existing security models for robust IoT service creation across the entire technology stack
	k	Fulfilling demand for real time services, including analysis and decision making, under fluctuating device data quality and technical limitations
		Rules of exchange
	l	Offering platform standards to connect stakeholders for joint service creation while simultaneously balancing the stakeholder concerns of overly dominant platforms (“the winner takes it all”)
	m	Increasing willingness to invest beyond the platform core (e.g., performance) and to push platform boundary technologies (e.g., software development kits)
Value co-creation		Interaction in ecosystem
	n	Overcoming the uncertainty of finding complementary partners who are willing to cooperate and have proven the right expertise within the ecosystem
	o	Establishing a common terminology and distributed knowledge bases between different ecosystem players
	p	Encouraging agile decision making between IoT ecosystem partners
		Internal processes
	q	Adjusting corporate regulations to enable a simplified collaboration with ecosystem partners
	r	Steering ownership for IoT projects within organizations by joining know-how of separated units
	s	Acquiring and maintaining technical know-how in the core business (e.g., device) but also on adjacent IoT layers (e.g., cloud, data, and analytics)
	t	Integration of IoT technology expertise and related business expertise to anticipate the complex interdependences of technological decisions and business impact (and vice versa)
	u	Developing a clear long-term IoT service strategy (including long-term investments) while relying on aspects of the ecosystem that are difficult to predict and evaluate
	v	Transforming the value creation logic and the corporate mindset toward service thinking (e.g., from product- to service-oriented business)
		Transparency of Activities
	w	Providing a clearly defined plan of roles and responsibilities for each actor involved in the service creation process, even though the ecosystem is uncertain and difficult to predict
	x	Making the value of jointly created IoT services for each involved actor accountable based on traditional evaluation figures (e.g., return on investment, business case calculations)
	y	Establishing data privacy requirements and data ownership regulations to build trust between stakeholders of previously separated ecosystems and foster joint service creation
	z	Acquiring and protecting crucial information property (e.g., specific domain know-how, analytic algorithms)

In the second phase of the Delphi study, the experts selected a manageable number of 11 challenges with a cut-of-value of 40%, following Singh et al. [79], which they evaluated in the third phase of the Delphi study. Within this phase the panelists also had a chance to provide feedback to the grouping of the challenges and to indicate whether their responses were grouped correctly and whether their ideas were represented appropriately responses [57, 58]. In Table A2 in the Appendix, we summarize the selection rate within the second phase, the ranking scores resulting from the third phase, and the congruence of our panelists on the respective challenges. In the final ranking phase, seven out of the eight dimensions derived from the framework of Lusch and Nambisan [44] were represented—indicating their importance to understand the main challenges regarding value co-creation in platform ecosystems. In particular, the three top-ranked challenges all belong to the transparency of activities dimension and are distinguished by a significantly higher selection rate in phase two. Thus, the results go in line with the experts’ assessment in round two stating a particular uncertainty about roles, trust, ownership and accountability. We compared the standard deviation of ranks resulting from the third phase of the Delphi study to further understand the ranking spread for the top 11 challenges. Particularly, the five most important challenges were rated with a score higher than 2 (and never 0) by each of our experts. The remaining five challenges had more variance, being rated 0 by at least one of the panelists and 10 by others, resulting in a moderate consensus level of 0.45 compared to previous Delphi studies in the IS field [40, 66].

Synthesis of Findings

Our Delphi study reveals both a comprehensive list of 26 challenges for value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems suggested by leading industry experts from the IoT domain, and a weighted subset of the 11 most important challenges. To provide guidance for future research, we first compare the identified challenges with the current state of the literature on nascent platforms, where a valuable knowledge base already exists and where additional research is needed (Table 2). Second, based on the assessment, we discuss the five identified gaps, namely, fear of lock-in, fear of an overly dominant platform, designing for trust, identifying the right partners, and a common language. Third, thereupon, we provide a research agenda with guiding research questions tailored to make the nascent stage of platform ecosystems a vibrant research domain.

Overall, through the structural lens of the service innovation framework, eight major challenge fields emerged from our Delphi study. These practical challenge fields reveal a broad set of overlaps with the condensed body of knowledge extracted from current literature—yet there is a distinct gap between literature and expert knowledge related to the interaction in ecosystems.

As depicted in Table 3, all identified challenges related to the categories of shared worldview (c–e), architecture of participation (f–g), and internal processes (q–v) are already mentioned in the existing literature. Beyond that, we identified a set of categories that has only been partially covered by extant literature: structural flexibility/integrity (b), resource density (h, j), rules of exchange (m), and transparency of activities (w, x). Finally, the category of interaction in ecosystem (to the best of our knowledge) has not yet been covered at all by the existing literature.

Table 3. Gaps Between Empirical Findings and Literature on Challenges of Nascent Platforms .

	Ecosystem		Platform			Value co-creation
	Structural flexibility/integrity	Shared worldview	Architecture of participation	Resource density	Rules of exchange	Interaction in ecosystem	Internal processes	Transparency of activities
Condensed empirical findings	Difficulties regarding the necessary flexibility to integrate (legacy) technology via open interfaces, while preventing the fear of technological lock-in effects	The alignment of actors’ interests, know-how, resources, and capabilities to a common worldview in terms of goals and common service creation is a significant challenge.	Against the backdrop of a creative and agile environment, finding a suitable measure of sustainable IT governance in terms of reusability is challenging, and comes along with difficulties to create services on an overarching data level.	Technical resources that facilitate the scalability of early demonstrators to actual real-time services that can handle huge amounts of data of different quality levels and fulfill security demands pose a challenge.	Providing rules that provide platform standards to connect stakeholders and pushing boundary resources beyond the platform core is a challenge—especially against the backdrop of avoiding stakeholder concerns of an overly dominant platform.	Interaction in the ecosystem is impeded by difficulties in finding complementary partners with the right expertise that share a common knowledge base, language and the capabilities of agile decision making.	Aligning the internal processes and in particular certain aspects of corporate governance, organizational setup, capabilities, technology and business expertise, strategy and mindset toward value co-creation in ecosystems is perceived as a challenge.	Creating transparency related to roles and responsibilities, accountability for value, and especially for IP protection, data privacy requirements and data ownership regulations to build trust between actors.
Related challenges	a-b	c-e	f-g	h-k	l-m	n-p	q-v	w-z
Literature coverage	partly covered	fully covered	fully covered	partly covered	partly covered	not covered◌	fully covered	partly covered
New aspect	Fear of lock-in is already present in early stages of platform development	-	-	Transforming demonstrators into scalable platform services and dealing with fluctuating device data quality	Avoiding concerns of a winner takes all situation, i.e., an overly dominant platform amongst stakeholders	Empirical findings are new	-	IP protection and building trust through data privacy and data protection regulation
Challenge (Delphi rank)	a (10)	-	-	i (>11), k (>11)	l (6)	n (9), o (11), p (>11)	-	y (2), z (>11)
Potential interesting avenue	Ensuring structural integrity without provoking lock-in fear			Efficient increase of resource density for the transformation of demonstrators into actual services Design of a transition process from pilot environments to real-world applications (considering issues of fluctuating device data quality and limitation)	Designing rules of exchange that do not deter actors based on the fear of an overly dominant platform	Facilitating the identification of the right partners with the right skills Creating a common language among actors Encouraging (incumbent actors with established decision-making processes) the adoption of agile decision making		Designing (data privacy and ownership policies) for trust among actors

The resulting gap between the current set of challenges that is documented in the extant literature and the results of our Delphi study comprises nine specific challenges (a, i, k, l, n, o, p, y, z). Among those, five challenges fall into the “top 11” as selected and ranked by the panel of experts (see Table A2 in the Appendix)—one with a high rank of 2 (y), one with a medium rank of 6 (l), and three with a rather low rank of >9 (a, n, o).

These five blind spots are particularly relevant for platform managers and practitioners but also (IS) scholars. While being classified as relevant in our Delphi study, they have not yet attracted much attention in the extant literature:

• First, the aspect of designing for trust among actors regarding the transparency of activities in value-co creation is a highly relevant, yet unexplored field of research.

• Second, designing rules of exchange for a platform that do not deter actors based on the fear of an overly dominant platform.

• Third, facilitating the identification of the right partners for value co-creation with the right skills for successful interaction in the ecosystem.

• Fourth, ensuring structural integrity within an ecosystem without provoking lock-in fear.

• Fifth, creating a common language for value co-creation among actors for successful interaction in the ecosystem.

Discussion

The success of platform businesses is closely linked to the early phases of platform development [12, 69, 99]. Yet while platform businesses fail at an alarming rate [103], literature on nascent platform ecosystems itself is in a nascent and fragmented state. Against the backdrop of the increasing growth of the body of literature on nascent platform ecosystems, it is particularly important to structure the field and guide future research efforts in order to close relevant gaps. To condense and structure the current body of knowledge on value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems, we thus conducted a comprehensive review of IS literature through the theoretical lens of the Service Innovation Framework. We found that in general, the Service Innovation Framework is a well-suited tool to harmonize and describe the current body of knowledge along the domains of ecosystem, platform, and value co-creation. In order to identify the most relevant fields for future research, we conducted a Delphi study among IoT experts through the same theoretical lens and identified five critical challenges in nascent platform ecosystems, which are perceived as relevant to practitioners but are not yet sufficiently covered in the literature on nascent platform ecosystems.

Thus, practitioners are currently left alone with the identification of adequate response strategies for this particular set of challenges. In the following we thus discuss the current blind spots from a practical perspective and introduce solution approaches from related fields. In doing so, we intend to sensitize practitioners for specific pitfalls on the way of establishing a successful platform business.

To provide researchers with a common ground, guidance, and inspiration for future research efforts, we introduce a research framework and agenda for nascent platform ecosystems.

A Practical View on Ecosystem Challenges

Our literature review revealed that there are several challenges in the ecosystem formation process related to a lack of structural integrity [33, 52, 95], diverse worldviews [4, 48, 49, 55, 78], and liberalistic architectures of participation [52, 55, 95]. One blind spot in IS literature is the fear of lock-in among actors in the early stages of platform ecosystems. As industry experts noted in our Delphi panel, platform operators trying to increase structural integrity may face perceived lock-in anxiety from customers and partners. Platform lock-in as negative effect of many mature platforms is widely acknowledged [39, 68, 90], yet the anticipating fear of such effects in nascent platform ecosystems needs a closer view on the evolutionary trajectory of the platform ecosystem life cycle. Even at an early stage, when structural integrity is of utmost importance for value creation, there is a fear of potential lock-in, which prevents more integrated and efficient value creation. Especially against the backdrop of ensuring the structural integrity of the platform ecosystem, platform providers need to tread carefully: An increase in structural integrity can improve the platform’s value creation process but may lead to a higher perceived lock-in fear of platform participants. A decrease in structural integrity, in turn, can lead to a lower perceived lock-in fear but may hinder the seamless integration of actors and their technologies into the platform. Practitioners should thus carefully monitor and balance the interests of platform participants and identify means of preventing potential lock-in fears. Microsoft, for instance, as a renowned nascent IoT platform provider, has started to publicly communicate on “How to avoid vendor lock-in” [3]—supporting the relevance of lock-in fear in nascent platform ecosystems.

A Practical View on Platform Challenges

Previous literature shows that there are a number of challenges in early stages of platform development related to a lack of (data-related) resources [52, 61, 62, 97] and rules that can limit exchange [9, 48, 52, 55, 64, 65]. The results of our Delphi study highlight another important area, namely, the fear of an overly dominant platform, which already occurs at early stages of platform development. An important aspect of our findings is that the panelists perceived fear of dominance even long before the platform was actually in a stable and mature state. We know from the literature on mature platforms that an overly dominant platform can in fact cause a variety of issues [1, 2, 18, 70]. Thus, it appears intuitive that the awareness of such negative effects will also shape the initial perception of nascent platforms. However, there is little documented knowledge about how the fear of potentially becoming a dominant platform can influence the development of nascent platforms. For practitioners, it is of utmost importance to consider the individual context of the platform endeavor at hand in order to derive suitable response strategies for this complex challenge. For example, incumbent firms that hold a leading position in their home market or already run a successful platform business could be easily perceived to aim for a similar development in the emerging platform market—especially when they are following established market patterns (“the Uber of … ”/“the Airbnb of … ”)[35]. Yet, such dynamics do also strongly depend on the specific industry context and the level of experience with dominant platforms in the specific context [27]. An interesting trend that is closely related to the fear of platform dominance is the rise of decentralized platforms that leverage a community-based approach to platform governance [8, 23]. Platform managers that face particularly strong impediments to their platform and ecosystem development related to the fear of an overly dominant platform may thus well consider a decentralized platform approach.

A Practical View on Value Co-Creation Challenges

The extant literature shows that value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems exhibits a number of known challenges, such as a low perceived need for platform-mediated interaction [50], internal processes that do not fit the platform rules [16, 25, 26, 49–51, 74, 78], and the lack of a clear “blueprint” for value capture [50, 52, 77, 78].

The results of our Delphi study emphasize the importance of two new, little-explored aspects of value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems that should be considered by practitioners and platform managers.

First, in terms of transparency of activities, it is particularly important that the concept of trust between the actors of nascent platform ecosystems has not yet been comprehensibly addressed in the literature, although trust plays a prominent role in value creation processes of platforms [69, 94] and has a long history as a concept in IS research [20, 81]. Especially in situations of high uncertainty, trust—that is, the willingness to accept vulnerability based on upcoming positive expectations [73]—plays a crucial role in facilitating value creation in digital platform ecosystems [30, 63]. Since nascent environments are prone to a particularly high level of uncertainty, we expect trust to play an even larger role. How to solve issues of trust and distrust (not only related to the transparency of activities among actors in nascent platform ecosystem) is a complex issue in and by itself [36]. Thus, managers should leverage and adapt knowledge that fits the context of their platform business model. In the case of two-sided markets, there is a well-documented body of literature [38]. Yet depending on the specific context, managers will need to break new ground. Advancements in the area of “trust-free” distributed ledger technology have raised a discourse regarding new perspectives on the issue of trust and trust building in platform-mediated markets [11, 28, 29], and thus provide the opportunity for radically new approaches to solving the issue of trust between the actors of nascent platform ecosystems.

Second, the results of our Delphi study show that there is a lack of knowledge about establishing interaction in an emerging platform ecosystem, particularly about how to identify appropriate interaction partners and how to find a common language.

In mature ecosystems, the processes of value co-creation are usually well established (including experiences or documented examples of successful activities) and thus, there is a common knowledge on the necessary capabilities of interaction partners and also a grown language fundament for communication [99]. Yet for platform ecosystems in a nascent state, the question of how to identify and select fitting interaction partners [5], for example, based on their competences [100], is challenging. It is also well known that the development of a common language is a vital factor for value co-creation [86, 96] and market performance [6]—yet in nascent platform ecosystems and particularly in the context of the IoT the development of a common language is a nontrivial issue [84]. For practitioners, it can be worthwhile to adapt strategies of incumbent firms entering the platform business in this context. Bosch, for example, started to adapt commonly known frameworks for business model innovation as a basis for developing an own consistent language for their platform business [35]. Furthermore, they allocated dedicated resources to the activities of partner management, which received a high degree of freedom and the opportunity to experiment with suitable formats based on a lean startup mentality [35]. In this sense, it is necessary for platform managers and practitioners to stay open-minded for experimentation in the absence of further document knowledge.

Building a Research Agenda for Nascent Platform Ecosystems

By mapping the perceived relevance of challenges identified in our Delphi study against the coverage in the extent body of IS literature, we identified and discussed the five most important gaps related to value co-creation through the lens of Lusch and Nambisan’s [44] Framework for Service Innovation. Importantly, the framework provides a broadened view of service innovation and describes its nature and structure. Thus, the work of Lusch and Nambisan [44] can be regarded as a milestone of identifying and integrating salient themes and concepts. As proven by our study, this view has sparked considerable research efforts related to value co-creation and related challenges. Yet some important issues remain unnoticed. We argue that the identified gaps require the attention of (IS) research, in order to comprehensibly understand the dynamics of value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems. As described, value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems is a dynamic process with a specific set of related challenges. To account for and emphasize this dynamic perspective, we thus propose a research agenda covering the top five gaps to guide and inspire future (IS) research activities. As Leclercq et al. [43] put it: “In increasingly complex competitive environments, the opportunity to engage customers in a value co-creation process is a highly challenging task for companies, especially in the online context.” The engagement develops and thus must be considered over time [43].

Our research agenda builds on a framework that is intended to stress the longitudinal nature of challenges in nascent platform ecosystems. It can thus be seen as a possible theoretical extension that complements the work of Lusch and Nambisan [44] by emphasizing the dynamic and time-dependent nature of existing gaps.

Given the central role of collaboration among actors to facilitate value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems, we draw on the work of Edvardsson et al. [14], who described the dynamic initiation process of B2B relationships in service dominant settings. Actors that strive to build B2B relationships need to pass through four major stages of relationship building: unrecognized (parties do not know each other), recognized (awareness of mutual business opportunities), considered (representatives discuss and co-develop objectives and scope of the relationship), and agreement/relationship [14].We suggest that in the context of value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems these stages can thus be studied along the three major activities: (i) recognize, (ii) consider, and (iii) build (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. The Recognize–Consider–Build Research Framework

Recognize

The driving force for joining an emerging platform ecosystem is the mutual awareness of business opportunities among participants, which must outweigh potential risks [14]. Our results show that fear of lock-in in particular is a key factor affecting mutual business benefits. But how does research measure fear of lock-in, and how does it distinguish between actual lock-in and perceived lock-in? A more nuanced understanding of fear of lock-in can help to attribute its impact to specific platform maturity stages. In addition, what are the core characteristics of early-stage ecosystem participants that influence the perception of business opportunities in the platform and how do they evolve over time? What is the theoretical basis for the conceptualization of the parameter? Once a clear understanding is established, how can scholars study instances of emerging digital platform formation while ensuring transferability to other domains and adding to the general body of knowledge? Our research identified the fear of an overly dominant platform as yet another critical challenge on a platform level, which is likely to increase perceived risks and thus impede potential entries to an ecosystem [14]. While the general notion of platforms exploiting their dominant position is known to the research community [71], the anticipation of such actions, as well as the resulting fear, should be studied more carefully. How, for example, can companies adapt their platform and ecosystem strategy to minimize not only the fear of but also the probability of an overly dominant platform? Under which circumstances is this fear justified—that is, which types of companies exploit their dominant position? How can unjustified fear be mitigated? Beyond these questions on an ecosystem and platform level, the co-creation of value requires a certain degree of mutual awareness [14] and thus a means of identifying the right partners. In recognizing business opportunities, the question arises of how “right” can be operationalized (e.g., in terms of a specific skillset and mindset that fosters co-creation). How can and should these characteristics be made transparent, in order to facilitate and coordinate matchmaking—for example, based on specific cues [91]?

Consider

As one of our panelists noted, “it’s not a lack of platforms, it’s a lack of participation.” Given the sheer number of platforms emerging in new economically viable spaces such as the IoT, the question is, what are the forces (events, capabilities, personal connections) that positively influence the consideration and selection processes in the nascent state of a platform ecosystem, and how can platform owners optimize them? From previous platform literature, we know that launching a platform in a defined homogeneous community (similar mindset and problems) can facilitate growth. However, what role does community play in the consideration process in extremely heterogeneous ecosystem settings such as the IoT (device manufacturer, tech companies, regulatory bodies, …), where there is not (yet) common world view, language, and so on? What is the role of traditional consideration facilitators such as standards bodies, alliances, or consortia in rapidly moving technology landscapes such as IoT? Can they still steer the ecosystem toward harmonization, or are de facto platforms with well-known competitive patterns (also from the open-source space) the only way to deal with the immense speed and dynamics? However, what happens if none of the de facto platform efforts reach a tipping point and the ecosystem remains fragmented to an extent that is detrimental to large-scale innovation?

Build

Building relationships that result in tangible agreements for value co-creation requires trust. Trust can in fact be considered as a “converter” [14], which drives the initiation and development of business relationships among actors. Importantly, little knowledge exists on how trust evolves in the context of value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems. In particular, researchers should explore how trusting relationships among individuals correspond with necessary trusting relationships among firms [14]. Thus, we propose the following research questions: How can trust in the context of value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems be built? What is the role of trust transfer (e.g., from individuals to firms) and reputation transfer [92, 93]?

Relationships in nascent platform ecosystems are often mediated by digital platforms, since the medium, which provides the fundament for trusting relationships, plays a vital role for the development of interpersonal or interfirm trust [82]. We thus propose to consider the following research question related to building trust as a converter in nascent platform ecosystems: What is the impact of “digitality” in nascent platform ecosystems on the nature of trusting relationships?

Since platforms act as a mediator for trusting relationships among firms and individuals, it is important to understand the means of influencing and fostering such relationships from a platform perspective (not only by means of trust transfer but also by mechanism and platform design). Thus, we propose to study the following research question: What are the most significant factors, platform providers can install to foster trust among actors to support the formation of relationships within the ecosystem?

Implications

Our study makes three important contributions to theory [24]. First, we contribute to the growing scholarly discussion on co-creation of value in nascent digital platform ecosystems [55, 88]. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to provide a comprehensive overview of the known challenges related to value creation in nascent digital platform ecosystems through a comprehensive literature review. As such, our findings lay the groundwork for longitudinal studies of platform ecosystems. By preparing and organizing the challenges at the nascent stage of platform ecosystems, we follow the call of previous research [69, 95] to consider the evolutionary aspects of platforms and specifically explore individual stages of maturity. While it is difficult to sharply define the exact boundaries of “nascentness,” our approach is well in line with other work [89] and sets the stage for a more nuanced understanding. In particular, our anchoring of the challenges in Lusch and Nambisan’s [44] framework for service innovation allows researchers to approach the identified issues more systematically and to integrate them as a starting point in longitudinal studies.

Second, the results of our Delphi study highlight new challenges related to shared value creation in emerging digital platform ecosystems that our panelists identified as very important and that are not yet covered by scientific literature. In this way, we highlight the gap between the current state of scientific knowledge as revealed by our literature review and the systematically ranked business challenges identified by the Delphi study. The derived research agenda, which focuses on the five areas of fear of lock-in, fear of an overly dominant platform, design for trust, identifying the right partners, and common language in nascent platform ecosystems, condenses our findings into an actionable research agenda for IS scholars grounded in our empirical findings. Exploring these research challenges contributes to a deeper understanding of the longitudinal dynamics of platform ecosystems by shedding light on the nascent state.

Finally, this study provides a contribution to theory on the nascent stage of platform ecosystems. Based on a comprehensive literature review and a Delphi study with industry experts, we reveal the major challenges that practitioners face in the early stages of platform development. The service innovation framework by Lusch and Nambisan [44], which not only constitutes the theoretical fundament of our work but also provides a valuable core of today’s theoretical understanding of the (B2B) platform economy [32], facilitates a valuable holistic view on value-co creation activities. Yet our study shows that within the last years of IS research, important challenges related to value co-creation have not yet been sufficiently addressed. In particular, the shift of creating value outside the boundaries of a platform organization by forming new types of business relationships for externally oriented value creation appears to challenge platform managers [35]. The issue of forming business relationships in service-dominant settings is not new per se [14]. Yet against the backdrop of “digitality” in platform business, our study reveals that it has not yet drawn the attention of IS researchers. In order to steer future research and to complement the valuable work of Lusch and Nambisan [44], we argue that research on forming business relationships in nascent platform ecosystems can profit from a dedicated theoretical approach. We contribute to theory on value co-creation in nascent platform ecosystems by proposing a new theoretical framework for studying the formation of business relationships in nascent platform ecosystems. Our framework covers the current blind spots in IS literature and provides the basis for a focused research agenda. We introduce the relationship initiation framework in nascent platform ecosystems grounded in the work of Edvardsson et al. [14]. The framework reflects three phases of relationship formation—recognize, consider, and build. In summary, our work is an important complement to existing research streams in the electronic commerce and integrates the various perspectives (ranging from digital platforms for B2B collaboration over co-creation and service-dominant logic) represented in the extent literature [10, 19, 54, 105].

Our research also provides important implications for platform managers and practitioners. First, the results of our Delphi study highlight little-noticed yet important challenges related to shared value creation in emerging digital platform ecosystems. Most importantly, our results show that managers, beyond current documented knowledge in IS literature, need to be aware of the fears of lock-in and an overly dominant platform, designing for trust, identifying the right partners, and a common language. To further support practitioners in effectively overcoming the identified challenges, we discuss several means of solution-oriented action to develop individual response strategies for nascent platform businesses. Platform owners who provide answers to the identified challenges are able to better build an ecosystem and overcome the most common pitfalls in these processes. Furthermore, we recommend that managers of nascent platforms use our findings for effective intra organizational expectation management. In the early stages of platform development, platforms are confronted with a variety of different expectations and hopes—especially in the incumbent space [35]. Our comprehensive list of challenges can help platform managers to get a realistic view of potential pitfalls on the path to a successful platform business and create awareness within their organization. In addition, managers building a platform ecosystem can use our findings to focus their resources on the most critical issues.

Limitations and Concluding Note

Despite the careful and rigorous execution of our study, its results need to be considered in light of limitations. First, our findings are derived from an expert sample with 21 panelists—a number that is consistent with other recent IS-related Delphi studies [40, 66]. In this regard, it is important to note that even though the Delphi methodology does not require the panel to be a representative sample in a statistical sense [67], the generalization of our results should be performed against the backdrop of the demography of our sample and also against the backdrop of the date of data collection. Furthermore, in order to better understand the impact of the research context on the generalizability of our results, future research could both explore the specifics of the IoT from a platform perspective and replicate our study in the context of other nascent digital platform domains. A second limitation relates to the level of consensus among the panelists in the third phase of our study. As explained in the Appendix, we decided to end the ranking with a moderate instead of a strong consensus level. In line with other Delphi studies [40, 79], we consider the moderate consensus level as acceptable with a sufficient degree of confidence. A final limitation may result from our sampling approach via the European Platform Initiative [15] and the subsequent common perception on challenges of value co-creation in platform ecosystems. However, we have mitigated these issues by integrating additional panelists from leading IoT platform companies unaffiliated with the initiative. On a more general level, the Delphi method itself can be regarded as a potential limitation to the study due to its qualitative nature and the risk of inappropriate use perceived by IS researchers [80]. Yet we argue that using the Delphi method in our context is a particularly good fit, due to its “effectiveness in addressing complex research issues where only partial understanding exists about a phenomenon or where expert participation is required to advance subject knowledge” [80].

A further limitation is subject to our complex research issue located in a nascent and fragmented body of literature. Since our goal was to structure and summarize the current state of knowledge and theory, we made a deliberate choice not to put an emphasis on critical assessment and discussion in order to reduce unnecessary complexity within the scope of our literature review. This descriptive review style, however, limits our possibilities to provide an extended critical discussion. Given the focus of our research, we argue, however, that the priority on providing a sound descriptive overview, which we enhance through the practical insights from our Delphi study, is appropriate.

With this article, we would like to set the stage and put a spotlight on the evolving research field of nascent platforms. We encourage both practitioners and researchers to build on our results in order to further understand and mitigate the challenges in nascent platform ecosystems. Co-creating value, overcoming fears, building trust, and finding partners and a common language—especially in times like these—are activities worth pursuing.

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.

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.

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.