Industry Platforms and Ecosystem Innovation

By Annabelle Gawer, Michael A. Cusumano. 2013

2,016 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper brings together the recent literature on industry platforms and shows how it relates to managing innovation within and outside the firm as well as to dealing with technological and market disruptions and change over time. First, we identify distinct types of platforms. Our analysis of a wide range of industry examples suggests that there are two predominant types of platforms: internal or company-specific platforms, and external or industry-wide platforms. We define internal (company or product) platforms as a set of assets organized in a common structure from which a company can efficiently develop and produce a stream of derivative products. We define external (industry) platforms as products, services, or technologies that act as a foundation upon which external innovators, organized as an innovative business ecosystem, can develop their own complementary products, technologies, or services. Second, we summarize from the literature general propositions on the design, economics, and strategic management of platforms. Third, we review the case of Intel and other examples to illustrate the range of technological, strategic, and business challenges that platform leaders and their competitors face as markets and technologies evolve. Finally, we identify practices associated with effective platform leadership and avenues for future research to deepen our understanding of this important phenomenon and what firms can do to manage platform-related competition and innovation.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8e0b049c7a8d998733b0d46e6fe8f9e83e7dba3

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In Management Science and Operations Research

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Citations in the corpus

Digital servitization business models in ecosystems: A theory of the firm (2019, background): “Gawer and Cusumano (Gawer & Cusumano, 2014: 417; Iansiti & Levien, 2004) de ﬁ ned platforms as “ products, services, or technologies that act as a foundation upon which external innovators, organized as an innovative business ecosystem, can develop their complementary products, technologies, or…”
Digital Innovation Management: Reinventing Innovation Management Research in a Digital World (2017, background): “For innovation outcomes, digital platforms and open standards enable collectives (of organizations or individuals) to pursue innovation collaboratively (e.g., Boudreau 2010; Bresnahan and Greenstein 2014; Gawer and Cusumano 2014; Parker et al. 2016; Tiwana et al. 2010).”
Managerial challenges of Industry 4.0: an empirically backed research agenda for a nascent field (2018, background): “…which provides them with the opportunity to observe how platforms emerge (Thomas et al. 2014), how firms manage to become platform leaders (Gawer and Cusumano 2014) and how corresponding dynamics affect the intention, direction and outcomes of innovation and competition in related…”
Digital Business Model, Digital Transformation, Digital Entrepreneurship: Is There A Sustainable “Digital”? (2020, background): “As “digital” comprises deep technology aspects, digital technology forms the basis of innovations in platform and digital environments [13,22,32,33].”
Digital platform ecosystems (2019, background): “The degree of openness also influences competition within and across ecosystems (Gawer 2014; Thomas et al. 2014).”
How open is innovation? A retrospective and ideas forward (2021, background): “Platforms are distinct from traditional companies in the way they mediate transactions across particpants and how they create network effects (Gawer, 2014).”
The evolution of intellectual property strategy in innovation ecosystems: Uncovering complementary and substitute appropriability regimes (2017, background): “…and open innovation, it is also relevant for future research and management of coopetition (e.g., Brandenburger and Nalebuff, 1996; Gnyawali and Park, 2011; Fernandez et al., 2014; Bouncken et al., 2015) and platforms (e.g., Gawer, 2014; Gawer and Cusumano, 2014; Bogers et al., 2017), respectively.”
Unpacking the innovation ecosystem construct: Evolution, gaps and trends (2016, background): “We also identi ﬁ ed some opportunities for further research. i) It is not clearhowa ﬁ rmbecomes aleader of anindustryplatform(as suggested by Gawer, 2014); ii) Which the organizational processes to implement and manage an industry platform are; iii) How to integrate the supply chain platform and…”