| dc.description.abstract | Digital platform ecosystems are increasingly shaping how business is conducted in all
industries. However, building them is far from straightforward. Specifically, building a digital
platform ecosystem refers to the actors’ act of developing such a platform, its boundary
resources, and the other resources necessary to promote its intended use. It also requires actors
to agree on the goals of the ecosystem and the roles they will assume. Here, governance is a
key topic because it helps address coordination problems and collaborative and competitive
challenges. Poor governance choices have been acknowledged as causing platform failures.
Therefore, there is increasing interest in this topic, although many questions remain. For
instance, it is still unknown how the different governance choices can be best combined or
affect one another. Moreover, the current understanding of which choices are more effective at
various stages of a platform’s development or in specific contexts, as in decentralized platform
ecosystems, is scant.
Therefore, I have decided to investigate decentralized platform ecosystems under development,
and, specifically, collaborative platform ecosystems, where companies join forces to address a
problem that they cannot solve in isolation. The overarching research question that this thesis
examines is: How does governance contribute to building a collaborative digital platform
ecosystem?
This introductory chapter first provides an overview and general understanding of the nature of
digital platforms and digital platform ecosystems. There follows a description of what to
consider when building a digital platform ecosystem. I also cover existing knowledge on digital
platform ecosystem governance, focusing on its various concepts and connections to the
building phase.
Overall, the present thesis addresses governance in the context of (collaborative) digital
platform ecosystems and its role in building them. The first article of the thesis is a literature
review that provides a structured overview and synthesis of digital platform ecosystem
governance from a systematic and multidisciplinary perspective. Articles 2 and 3 are empirical
and based on a longitudinal, qualitative case study of a collaborative digital platform ecosystem
in the Norwegian aquaculture industry.
This research contributes to the academic conversation on digital platform ecosystem
governance by showing that, in building collaborative digital platform ecosystems, governance
can enable coordination among actors and ease their competitive and cooperative challenges.
Moreover, this research suggests that collaborative digital platform ecosystems can be at least
partially planned and that their governance is more collective and emergent compared to
centralized platform ecosystems. Furthermore, each individual article provides specific
theoretical and practical implications | en_US |
