Platform Ecosystems as Complex Adaptive Systems: Exploring Emergence in India’s Aadhaar Project

Abstract

We advance a view of digital platforms as generative of innovation phenomena that emerge from causal mechanisms and complex reinforcing interactions that are adaptive. Drawing from literature on complex adaptive systems (CAS), we develop our arguments with an exploratory case study of the Aadhaar platform ecosystem – the world’s largest biometric identification system that has emerged in less than a decade to transform service provision to over 1.2 billion Indian residents. We trace mechanisms endogenous to the platform artefacts – a control mechanism, a generativity mechanism, and an innovation mechanism – that interact with each other and with political and economic forces to underpin a range of emergent phenomena associated with the platform such as its scale, scope and hard-to-imitate integration into the Indian context. We show that platform ecosystems are complex adaptive systems whose emergent outcomes are better explained by overall dynamics across the platform and its embedded context rather than by standalone mechanisms. We contribute to the digital innovation literature by illuminating emergence across socially embedded digital ecosystems.