Inter-Organizational Ecosystems in Software Development

Abstract

Companies are increasingly exposed to disruptive technologies and unexpected competitors that pose potential threats to their business success. To avert suchthreats, pressed companies increasingly create and transform goods together with other organizational actorsin so-called inter-organizational ecosystems (Adner, 2006, 2017; Jacobides, Cennamo, & Gawer, 2018; Lumineau & Oliveira, 2018).These inter-organizational ecosystems describe groups of interacting organizational actorsthat are mutually dependent on each other's activities (Jacobides et al., 2018).The growing prevalence of inter-organizational ecosystems builds on information systems (IS), which allow a distribution of innovation agencyacross multiple organizational actorsby means ofdigital technology(Nambisan, Lyytinen, Majchrzak, & Song, 2017)forco-creatingvalue (Sarker, Sarker, Sahaym, & Bjorn-Andersen, 2012).These advantages are of particular importancein software developmentand havecontributed much to the popularity of platformecosystems (i.e., Tiwana, Konsynski, & Bush, 2010)and innovation ecosystems (i.e., Adner & Kapoor, 2010).The three studies of this dissertation (see Table 1) focus on platform ecosystems (i.e., studies 1 and 2) and innovation ecosystems (i.e., study 3).