Thierry ISKIA, Institut Mines-Telecom Business School (France) 
Mark DE REUVER, Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) 

Track's Contacts : 

thierry.isckia[AT]imt-bs.eu
G.A.deReuver[AT]tudelft.nl

Creating a digital platform to access and leverage the potential of an ecosystem is recognized as an effective strategy to achieve market success. Platforms help ecosystems reach new potential and create the conditions for the development of catalytic reactions between various partners that, because they interact with each other, affect the value a platform can create for each of them. The more innovative these partners are, the more vibrant the ecosystem will be, subject to facilitating the transformation of new ideas into new products or services that can be brought to market. Platform ecosystems are characterized by a flexible and scalable architecture of cooperation designed to leverage collective intelligence (Nambisan & Sawhney, 2007; Prandelli et al, 2008), illustrating the ability to reach objectives that go beyond what could be possibly achieved by a single company. This network-centric innovation approach (Nambisan & Sawhney, 2011) focuses on cultivating innovation and creativity, on making, connecting and experimenting with the aim of turning shared knowledge into new products and/or services. In the recent years, platform-based ecosystems (Ceccagnoli et al, 2012; Isckia & Lescop, 2013; Cennamo & Santaló, 2013; Isckia, 2011, Isckia & Lescop, 2015, Tiwana, 2014, Choudary et al, 2016; McIntyre & Srinivasan, 2017) which are a subset of business ecosystems (Koenig, 2013) became a « recurrent pattern of behaviour » (Allen, 1983) in terms of innovation.

These architectures of collaboration rely on an original approach of value creation which is based on multiple processes sequentially and/or simultaneously involving different actors, communities, activities and resources. As such, platform ecosystems implement a set of rules and governance mechanisms designed to facilitate the enrollment of independent actors in the pursuit of distributed, collaborative, and cumulative innovation. These institutional mechanisms (Sharapov, Thomas & Autio 2013, Thomas & Autio, 2014) are critical to the understanding of how platform-based ecosystems coordinate innovation efforts. The aim of this track is to go a step further in platform ecosystems analysis, focusing on orchestration processes i.e. how the keystone organization or platform leader ensures everyone's contribution throughout the platform's life cycle.

References

Ceccagnoli, M., Forman, C., Huang, P., & Wu, D. J. (2012). Cocreation of Value in a Platform Ecosystem: The Case of Enterprise Software. MIS quarterly, 263-290.

Cennamo, C., & Santalo, J. (2013). Platform competition: Strategic trade-offs in platform markets. Strategic Management Journal, 34(11), 1331-1350.

Choudary, S-P, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, & Geoffrey G. Parker. (2016). Platform revolution: How networked markets are transforming the economy and how to make them work for you. WW Norton & Company.

McIntyre, D. P., & Srinivasan, A. (2017). Networks, platforms, and strategy: Emerging views and next steps. Strategic Management Journal, 38(1), 141-160.

Nambisan, S., and Sawhney, M. (2007). The Global Brain: Your roadmap for innovating faster and smarter in a networked world. Pearson Education India.

Nambisan, S., & Sawhney, M. (2011). Orchestration processes in network-centric innovation: Evidence from the field. The Academy of Management Perspectives, 25(3), 40-57.

Prandelli, E., Sawhney, M., and Verona, G. (2008). Collaborating with customers to Innovate: Conceiving and Marketing Products in the Networking Age. Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.

Tiwana, A. (2014). Platform Ecosystems: Aligning Architecture, Governance, and Strategy. Morgan Kaufmann.