Original title: Platform ecosystems as meta‐organizations: Implications for platform strategies
A platform brings together a central service and add-ons made by other groups, such as businesses or developers. The parts fit together because the platform sets design rules and offers a shared purpose. The authors call this a “meta-organizationAn organization made up of other organizations, with looser control than a typical company.”: more coordinated than a market, but less tightly controlled than a company. They explain how platforms use power, incentives, and rules to coordinate participants and compete.
A community potluck needs people to bring dishes that fit the meal. It gets tricky when guests have different tastes and no one person can simply order everyone around. In this paper, the shared meal is the platform, each dish is a participant’s contribution, and the host’s guidelines stand for the rules that help the group work together.
People and businesses that join a platform may depend on it while also competing over the value they create. Understanding how platforms set rules, attract participants, and coordinate them helps explain how they compete with established firms, rival platforms, and their own participants.
The abstract describes a conceptual discussion of platform ecosystems and how papers in a special issue inform questions about competition. It does not report a specific empirical test or establish that one platform strategy works best. It identifies future research directions but does not specify them in the abstract.
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Platform ecosystems as meta‐organizations: Implications for platform strategies — Tobias Kretschmer, Aija Elina Leiponen, Melissa A. Schilling et al. — Strategic Management Journal — doi:10.1002/smj.3250
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.