Extended Generativity Theory on Digital Platforms

Abstract

The assumption that generativity engenders unbounded growth has acquired an almost taken-for-granted position in information systems and management literature. Against this premise, we examine the relationship between generativity and user base growth in the context of a digital platform. To do this, we synthesize the literature on generativity into two views, social interaction (expansion of ecosystem boundaries) and product view (expansion of product boundaries), that jointly and individually relate to user base growth. Both views help us explain how opening a platform relates to the emergence and resolution of conflicting expectations in a platform ecosystem that result in new functions and expanded use. We adopt a panel vector autoregressive approach combining data from six large transaction platforms that engaged with open-source developer communities. We found that the dominant narrative of generativity engendering growth, although generally supported by our analysis, obscures the fact that the inverse is also true; that is, growth can lead to expansion of product boundaries (inverse generativity) and that generativity can be bounded; that is, growth can stabilize ecosystem boundaries (bounded generativity). Against this background, we propose an extended generativity theory that presents generativity and growth in an integrative view and raises awareness about the limitations of the “unbounded growth” claim. We conclude that there is value in separating the two views of generativity conceptually and analytically, along with their relationship to user base growth, and we call for research on the pathways through which generativity produces growth. History: Ola Henfridsson, Senior Editor; Robert Wayne Gregory, Associate Editor. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2023.1209 .

Conceptualizing digital service: coconstitutive essence and value cocreation dynamics

“…This aligns with the characteristics of digital phenomena (Nambisan et al ., 2017; Piccoli et al ., 2022; Salmela et al ., 2022) and resonates with recent suggestions to consider digital technology users as active participants fulfilling various roles, such as controlling system behavior, utilizing the system, partnering with the system or contributing to its augmentation (Baskerville and Myers, 2023), for instance through the provision of digital trace data. This contrasts with the paradigm of centralized control over IT-enabled service provision, recognizing that complete control by the service inceptor may not always be feasible or even desired (Fürstenau et al ., 2023). In this instance, value is seen as an outcome of cocreation dynamics (Tuunanen et al ., 2023a; Vargo et al ., 2020), fostering innovation (Baskerville et al ., 2020; Lusch and Nambisan, 2015) through the recombination of digital objects.…”

“…Baiyere et al (2023) argue that digitization and digitalization are coconstitutive, such that the evolution of digital objects can afford new digitalization potential, which can in turn, mandate changes in those digital objects. This dynamic, co-evolutionary process that reflects current insights on digital innovation (Nambisan et al, 2017) is possible because digital objects are epistemic, programmable and malleable (Thomas and Tee, 2022), allowing for their evolution on a large scale to be organic and uncoordinated (F€ urstenau et al, 2023;Yoo, 2013), as well as involving different groups of actors over time. Consistent with the digitalization perspective, this means that digital objects can be (re)used and (re)combined in different ways to answer the needs of a wide variety of contexts to create new services Thus, this coconstitutive ontology invites researchers to build on both perspectives to gain a richer understanding about what makes digital phenomena different from their more conventional (e.g.…”

“…Vial, 2023) and digital platforms and ecosystems (e.g. Fürstenau et al ., 2023; Wareham et al ., 2014), among others. Although the potential of generativity is often exclusively seen as positive, recent works have started to question the notion that it always leads to unbounded growth.…”

“…Indeed, it has been argued that generativity can also have some downsides because it fosters complexity through the recombination of technologies that are created, maintained and managed by groups of actors with potentially conflicting interests or lacking awareness of each other’s existence (e.g. Fürstenau et al ., 2023). We subscribe to this more nuanced perspective of generativity recognizing that its benefits might be transient or beneficial for some actors while detrimental to others (Vial, 2023; Zittrain, 2009).…”

Network constraint and online group innovation: a dual perspective of inter-community group network and intra-community group network

“…Network constraint, which is defined as the degree to which an actor's external contacts are connected (Singh et al, 2011;Wu, 2013;Burt, 1992), can reflect the diverse information, knowledge and resources available to the actor (Burt, 1992(Burt, , 2001 and is a very important network structure that found to affect generative resources and knowledge collaboration in the community-based networks (Grewal et al, 2006;Singh et al, 2011;Kim et al, 2018;Sutanto et al, 2021;Mazzola et al, 2023). Considering that network constraint can characterize the boundary reshaping behavior in online communities to some extent (Dahlander and Frederiksen, 2012;Butler and Wang, 2012;Kim et al, 2018;F€ urstenau et al, 2023), the evolution and measurement of network constraint may have changed in the context of online self-organizing groups (Park et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2013) and the effect of network constraint on team effectiveness in the context that viewing teams as dynamic hubs of participants remain undertheorized (Mortensen and Haas, 2018;Park et al, 2020;Lavoie et al, 2024), we focus on the effect of network constraint on group innovation performance in this study.…”