Innovating in Digital Platforms: An Integrative Approach

Neves da Rocha, Fábio; Pollock, Neil

Abstract

Increasing competitive pressures are leading companies to innovate through digital platforms. The dominant theme within extant research on innovation in these platforms conceptualises two different processes: Generativity (Tilson et al., 2010; Yoo et al., 2012) and generification (Hanseth and Bygstad, 2015; Pollock et al., 2007). Each of the conceptualisations gives extensive accounts separately, but they have questionable ability to provide a full understanding of innovation in digital platforms when there is a plural occurrence of these processes (Sørensen and Williams, 2002). Drawing on an analysis of rich archival data complemented by interviews reporting five-year relationship between a platform owner and its customer, we revisited underlying assumptions of its processes. We argue that generativity and generification are related to each other in a constant flux in which one fuels the other. In this relation, control has new roles other than as key factor for innovation productiv ity (cf. Eaton et al., 2015; Yoo et al., 2012), and it is subordinated to the purpose of innovation. As a consequence, innovation purpose seems to constrain the ‘control vs autonomy’ paradox (Lyytinen et al., 2017).

Citation

Neves da Rocha, F., & Pollock, N. (2019, May). Innovating in Digital Platforms: An Integrative Approach. Presented at 21st International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Heraklion, Crete, Greece

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 21st International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
• Start Date: May 3, 2019
• End Date: May 5, 2019
• Publication Date: 2019
• Deposit Date: Mar 14, 2024
• Publisher: Scitepress Digital Library
• Pages: 505-515
• Series ISSN: 2184-4992
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS
• ISBN: 978-989-758-372-8
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5220/0007711105050515
• Keywords: Digital Platform, Digital Innovation, Generativity, Generification, Enterprise System, ERP
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/3529466