Understanding controversies in digital platform innovation processes: The Google Glass case

Abstract

Due to their scaling potential and complexity, digital platforms tend to generate public interest, and in some cases significant controversies and paradoxes. Previous research has generated knowledge about controversies in digital platform innovations. However, this work mainly focuses on the types of controversies and their effects rather than on the process of controversy emergence. In this article, we analyze how controversies related to digital platform innovation emerge and how they unfold over the innovation process. We analyze the case of the Google Glass failure to establish this ARSG (Augmented Reality Smart Glasses) extension to Google's digital platform. The paper contributes to the study of controversies by analyzing the digital platform innovation process as a process of translation, in which there are possible controversy emergence points originated in types of disagreements among the different human actors involved and their interactions with non-human elements. These disagreements are related to specific features of digital platforms: the digital platform generativity, the multisided market arrangements in the platform; the loosely coupled layers of technologies and applications involved, and the opaqueness that results from these arrangements. The framework proposed can support digital platform scholars and practitioners to in better understand and manage controversies.