Capabilities for value co-creation and value capture in emergent platform ecosystems: A longitudinal case study of SAP’s cloud platform

Maximilian Schreieck,Helmut Krcmar,Manuel Wiesche

doi:10.1177/02683962211023780

Maximilian Schreieck, Helmut Krcmar + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/02683962211023780

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Abstract

Companies across industries are shifting toward a platform ecosystem strategy. By leveraging cloud computing technologies, companies aim to benefit from collaboration with a wide range of third-party developers within emergent platform ecosystems. To succeed, these companies need to develop new organizational capabilities to co-create and capture value in platform ecosystems. To understand what capabilities are crucial to establish platform ecosystems and how they contribute to value co-creation and value capture, we conducted a multi-year, in-depth case study of SAP’s cloud platform project. We identified (1) technology-related capabilities (cloud-based platformization, open IT landscape management) and (2) relationship-driven capabilities (ecosystem orchestration, platform evangelism, platform co-selling) and illustrate how these capabilities help the platform owner to enable and balance value co-creation and value capture in an emergent platform ecosystem. With our findings, we contribute to the discussion on how companies can overcome the challenging emergent phase of platform ecosystems. We thereby bridge literature on value creation in platform ecosystems and on organizational capabilities. Though we conducted our study in the context of the enterprise software industry, we discuss how our findings apply to prospective platform owners from different contexts.

Highlights

In recent years, companies across industries have started to build platform ecosystems to leverage broad networks of third-party developers for value co-creation (Ceccagnoli et al, 2014; Förderer et al, 2018; Sandberg et al, 2020)
We show that SAP developed crucial platform ecosystem capabilities that are technology-related and relationship-driven
Corley and Gioia, 2004), we argue that the platform ecosystem capabilities we have identified are relevant for emergent platform ecosystems beyond the enterprise software industry

Summary

Introduction

Companies across industries have started to build platform ecosystems to leverage broad networks of third-party developers for value co-creation (Ceccagnoli et al, 2014; Förderer et al, 2018; Sandberg et al, 2020). A number of studies have considered the wider relationships in ecosystems as resources for capabilities: digital business innovation capability refers to collaborations with independent ecosystem actors to drive innovation (Helfat and Raubitschek, 2018; Tan et al, 2015; Venkatraman et al, 2014) This overview shows that most organizational capabilities in IS focus on how technology and relationship resources contribute to value creation within an organization or within close partnerships. To shed light on the capabilities that organizations need in the emergent phase of platform ecosystems, we conducted a multi-year, in-depth case study on the enterprise software vendor SAP and its cloud platform project. A company’s ability to leverage employees’ up-to-date skills related to hardware and software

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