Abstract
Platform strategies, which highlight the interdependence in and evolution of business ecosystems, are increasingly relevant for sustainable business models in the digital era. So far, platform research has existed as a fragmented body of insights from different fields, but an integrated theoretical perspective can lead to a more coherent understanding of the research overall. Organizational ambidexterity emphasizes the balance between exploration and exploitation, which is particularly conducive to understanding the sustainability of a firm. Using an organizational ambidexterity perspective, the authors analyze five platform strategies: pricing, openness, integration, differentiation, and envelopment. This paper provides a systematic review of the theoretical and empirical studies in leading management, economics, and information systems journals from 2000 to 2016. The findings show that platform strategies can help platform owners achieve ambidexterity by domain, temporal, and organizational separation. Finally, this paper proposes an agenda for future research.
Highlights
Platform ecosystems have had a far-reaching impact on businesses over the last two decades
The paper is organized as follows: first, we introduce the organizational ambidexterity (OA) perspective as a theoretical tool for the review, the methodology for which is explained ; we discuss the main findings of platform strategies; we propose an agenda for future research and conclude our findings
We identified five main categories into which the insights from platform literature may be classified: pricing, openness, integration, differentiation, and envelopment
Summary
Platform ecosystems have had a far-reaching impact on businesses over the last two decades. Platforms are becoming ubiquitous in many industries, such as smartphones and apps [1], video consoles and videogames [2], and personal computers and software [3]. Platforms allow firms to create new interdependencies that make the task of designing a successful platform strategy more complex [4,5,6]. A platform-based strategy has the potential to increase a firm’s competitive sustainability [7]. Driven by same-side and cross-side network effects, platform ecosystems feature inherent self-enhancing mechanisms. Once a platform starts a virtuous cycle, the positive feedback loop among different sides of users can help the platform sustain its user base growth and engagement
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