Examining the role of Competing Logics and Tensions in the Trajectory of Emerging Platform Ecosystems
Research project
Although digital platforms provide organizations vast opportunitis in terms of cost savings, risk distribution, increased innovation from distributed actors, the dynamics surrounding their governance and their genesis remains less understood.
Today we are facing drastic change as digital technologies extend their reach beyond technological-centric industries. Responding to such changes spurred by digitization, organizations are increasingly shifting from internal resource utilization towards leveraging external actors in the development of services. Digital platforms enable such migration as they provide a technological base for organizations to co-create value with external actors. Although digital platforms are a promising model for many organizations, studies mostly draw on phenomena grounded in leading and thriving industries. This project seeks to understand challenges in formative stages and the role of competing logics in the trajectory of platforms ecosystems.
Project overview
Project period:
2014-09-01 –
2019-09-18
Participating departments and units at Umeå University
Although platforms have long been observe as key in increasing efficiency in organizations, their use had mostly been limited in facilitating internal product development processes. Today as digital technologies enter traditional industrial settings, digital platforms have become a valuable model for organizing. Digital platforms allow organizations and distributed actors to engage in value creation through the flexibility it technological base provides for multiple actors. Bringing such distributed actors together is an inherently challenging task requiring very different levels and types of governance, i.e., control and coordination. Although digital platforms is a promising logic for organizing, current understanding of platforms builds mostly on assumptions in leading industry and incumbent platform ecosystem, thus broadly obscuring our understanding of how platforms emerge and their genesis.
In my research, I seek to explore ways in which platforms create value for different users and, explore practices in dealing with tensions as organizations migrate from existing products internal-based service development to platforms-based organizing.
