Platform Boundary Choices & Governance: Opening-Up While Still Coordinating and Orchestrating☆
Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Platforms
ISBN: 978-1-78743-080-8, eISBN: 978-1-78743-079-2
Publication date: 16 September 2017
Abstract
Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
Professor Michael Cusumano deserves special credit for ongoing conversations and exchange on questions of competition and innovation in this industry. This chapter benefitted greatly from sharp insights and careful reading by an anonymous referee and the editors. I would also like to thank industry participants who provided crucial insights, including executives at Diamond, Epocrates, Geofox, Lynuxworks, Mobilinux, NTT Docomo, Oregon Scientific, PalmSource, Psion, Sony, Symbian, Texas Instruments, Trolltech, and to Alessandro Araldi, Peter Bancroft, Larry Berkin, David Childers, Paul Crossley, Michael Davies, Andrie Devries, Richard Doherty, Chris Dunphy, Jerry Epplin, Jessica Figueras, David Gannon, Eric Geruldsen, Eric Giguere, Avner Goren, Todd Gort, George Grey, Randy Guisto, Dan Hantula, Oto Hiroyuki, Virginia Hodges, David Kipping, Evan Koeblentz, J Kuper, Timothy Lehane, Elisabeth Liddell, David Limp, Michael Mace, Steve Mann, Darrin Massena, Gary McFadden, Kip Meintzer, David Nagel, Derek Peachey, Kathleen Peters, Will Pinnell, Robert Quinn, Jim Ready, Inder Singh, Steve Strassman, Christopher Tilley, and Jason Wells. International Data Corporation and Gartner for contributed data used in this study. Several colleagues and friends provided helpful comments on an earlier dissertation chapter version of this chapter, including Ron Adner, Sinan Aral, Nicholas Argyres, Carliss Baldwin, Stefano Brusoni, Annabelle Gawer, Bob Gibbons, Ben Gomes-Casseres, Bernard Garrette, Andrei Hagiu, Alden Hayashi, John Henderson, Rebecca Henderson, Michael Jacobides, Lars Bo Jeppesen, Nicola Lacetera, Karim Lakhani, Richard Langlois, Michael Leiblein, Rafel Lucea, Claude Menard, Marc Meyer, Ramana Nanda, Joanne Oxley, Hazhir Rahmandad, Marc Rysman, Richard Schmalensee, Lourdes Sosa, Fernando Suarez, Marshall Van Alstyne, Eric Van den Steen, N. Venkat Venkatraman, Eric von Hippel and David Yoffie and seminar participants at Academy of Management, Atlanta Competitive Advantage Conference, Bocconi University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Paris. I wish to acknowledge funding and support provided by MIT, HEC-Paris, the Paris Chamber of Commerce, and MIT. All errors are my own.
Citation
Boudreau, K.J. (2017), "Platform Boundary Choices & Governance: Opening-Up While Still Coordinating and Orchestrating
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017 Emerald Publishing Limited