Innovating in Digital Platforms: An Integrative Approach

Fábio Neves da Rocha, Neil Pollock

2019

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 productivity (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).

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Neves da Rocha F. and Pollock N. (2019). Innovating in Digital Platforms: An Integrative Approach.In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-758-372-8, pages 505-515. DOI: 10.5220/0007711105050515

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis19,
author={Fábio Neves da Rocha and Neil Pollock},
title={Innovating in Digital Platforms: An Integrative Approach},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS,},
year={2019},
pages={505-515},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007711105050515},
isbn={978-989-758-372-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS,
TI - Innovating in Digital Platforms: An Integrative Approach
SN - 978-989-758-372-8
AU - Neves da Rocha F.
AU - Pollock N.
PY - 2019
SP - 505
EP - 515
DO - 10.5220/0007711105050515