Digital platforms are an omnipresent phenomenon that challenges incumbents by changing how we consume and provide digital products and services. Whereas traditional firms create value within the boundaries of a company or a supply chain, digital platforms utilize an ecosystem of autonomous agents to co-create value. Scholars from various disciplines, such as economics, technology management, and information systems have taken different perspectives on digital platform ecosystems. In this Fundamentals article, we first synthesize research on digital platforms and digital platform ecosystems to provide a definition that integrates both concepts. Second, we use this definition to explain how different digital platform ecosystems vary according to three core building blocks: (1) platform ownership, (2) value-creating mechanisms, and (3) complementor autonomy. We conclude by giving an outlook on four overarching research areas that connect the building blocks: (1) technical properties and value creation; (2) complementor interaction with the ecosystem; (3) value capture; and (4) the make-or-join decision in digital platform ecosystems.

While traditional organizations create value within the boundaries of their firm or supply chain, digital platforms leverage and orchestrate a platform-mediated ecosystem to create and co-create value with a much wider array of partners and actors. Although the change to two-sided markets and their generalization to platform ecosystems have been adopted among various industries, both academic research and industry adoption have lagged behind in the healthcare industry. To the best of our knowledge current Information Systems research has not yet incorporated an interorganizational perspective of the digital transformation of healthcare. This neglects a wide range of emerging changes, including changing segmentation of industry market participants, changing patient segments, changing patient roles as decision makers, and their interaction in patient care. This study therefore investigates the digital transformation of the healthcare industry by analyzing 1830 healthcare organizations found on Crunchbase. We derived a generic value ecosystem of the digital healthcare industry and validated our findings with industry experts from the traditional and the start-up healthcare domains. The results indicate 8 new roles within healthcare, namely: information platforms, data collection technology, market intermediaries, services for remote and on-demand healthcare, augmented and virtual reality provider, blockchain-based PHR, cloud service provider, and intelligent data analysis for healthcare provider. Our results further illustrate how these roles transform value proposition, value capture, and value delivery in the healthcare industry. We discuss competition between new entrants and incumbents and elaborate how digital health innovations contribute to the changing role of patients.

Digital technologies are radically changing how established organizations design novel services. Digital transformation (DT) strategies are executed to manage the transition from product-centric to service-centric business models based on digital technologies. However, little is known about what configurations of DT strategies lead to successful digital service innovation (DSI) in established organizations. We employ fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis on a set of 17 case studies of DT strategies from established organizations with different industry backgrounds. We identify several distinct configurations of DT strategies that lead to successful and unsuccessful DSI. Based on these configurations, we deduce that the threat of digital disruption negatively impacts an organization’s innovation activities. Furthermore, we find that strategic partnerships can be leveraged by organizations that face an imminent threat of digital disruption while organizations with competitive advantages may rely on “do-it-yourself” approaches. Lastly, we find that the involvement of a C-level executive is a necessary requirement for successful DSI. Our results contribute to theory by integrating research on DSI and DT, providing a perspective on DSI failure, and employing a configurational research approach that allows us to highlight interdependencies between factors as well as insights into the individual factors. Furthermore, we provide actionable recommendations for executives.

Digital transformation is continuously changing ecosystems, which also forces established companies to re-evaluate their value proposition. However, only transformations of single ecosystems have been studied. Therefore, this work targets to examine the similarities of digital transformation in five platform ecosystems: automotive, blockchain, financial, insurance, and IIoT. For our analysis, we combine the strengths of conceptual modeling using e3 value with a cluster analysis based on text mining to identify similarities in the respective ecosystems. As a result, we identified 15 clusters. Cluster 01 is the core cluster, containing the roles of organizations from all five ecosystems. Cluster 02-05 are intertwined, as they include roles from at least two ecosystems. Clusters 06-15 are ecosystem-specific that only include roles found in one ecosystem. Scholars and practitioners can use these clusters when analyzing or building a new platform ecosystem, or transforming a traditional ecosystem towards a platform ecosystem.

No abstract