Collection

Special Issue on "Standardization for platform ecosystems"

Submission status
Closed

In the coming years, various technological developments such as cloud computing, internet of things, big data, and artificial intelligence are expected to further drive the digital transformation of economies and societies. Because IT makes its appearance in various sectors, we see a trend towards increased interconnectivity within and between sectors. As a result, the boundaries between sectors are becoming increasingly blurred. The technological developments will result in platform ecosystems that consist of connected but previously unrelated stakeholders from different backgrounds (e.g. in terms of type (public/private), industry background) (Kenney and Zysman 2016) and complex systems that consist of established subsystems that originate from different sectors (van de Kaa et al. 2015). These can refer to digital infrastructures such as a smart grid (including ICT and energy sector subsystems), or the cloud.

The notion of ecosystems has become increasingly popular to describe a certain type of environment as shown by an increasing number of studies published on the topic during the last five years (Bogers et al. 2019). Research on ecosystems has converged towards a shared understanding of what a platform-based ecosystem (Hein et al. 2020) is – with authors highlighting aspects such as ‘joint value creation (Bogers et al. 2019), supermodular complementarity (Jacobides et al. 2018) or ‘alignment structure of the multilateral set of partners’ (Adner 2017). This collection gathers research that addresses the role of standardization in the success of these platform ecosystems so that ultimately we can come closer to realizing the digital transformation of economies and societies.

Editors

  • Geerten van de Kaa Geerten van de Kaa , 

    Geerten van de Kaa

    Delft University of Technology, Netherlands G.vandeKaa@tudelft.nl

  • Eric Viardot Eric Viardot  &

    Eric Viardot

    EADA Business School Barcelona, Spain eviardot@eada.edu

  • Ian P. McCarthy Ian P. McCarthy

    Ian P. McCarthy

    Simon Fraser University, Canada, and Luiss, Italy ian_mccarthy@sfu.ca

Articles (6 in this collection)