Digital platforms are an organizational form made up of a technological architecture and governance mechanisms for managing autonomous complementors. A platform’s success depends on their engagement in value creation and capture. Prior studies of such engagement have mainly focused on a platform’s governance mechanisms without recognizing their interdependence to its technological architecture. There is therefore a limited understanding of how the interplay between governance and architecture configures platform organizations, and why these configurations produce different levels of complementor engagement. In this paper, our analysis of a 12-year study of a shared platform initiative yields three configurations of platform organizations: vertical, horizontal, and modular. Based on these configurations, we develop propositions that theorize the implications of these organizational forms for complementor engagement. We further propose that these insights, which we derive from a shared platform, are particularly relevant for blockchain-based platforms.

Introduction

Digital platforms1 as an emergent organizational form (Gawer, 2014; Nambisan et al., 2017) are characterized by (1) technology: a technological architecture constituted of a modular core, standardized interfaces, and complementary extensions (e.g., Baldwin and Woodard, 2009; Karhu et al., 2018), and (2) social processes: a set of governance mechanisms to manage an ecosystem of independent complementors who complete the platform’s value proposition by co-creating its value (e.g., Adner, 2017; Nambisan, 2017). By mediating the interactions among such complementors, platforms afford multi-sided markets that are an indispensable part of our contemporary economy (Ceccagnoli et al., 2012; Lusch and Nambisan, 2015). Especially in industries characterized by network effects, a platform’s value proposition depends on complementors to enact and evolve it (e.g., de Reuver et al., 2018; Parker et al., 2017). However, it is challenging for platform organizations to “discover and implement a complex value proposition via an innovation ecosystem while also ensuring that it will benefit from the fruits of the collective effort” (Dattée et al. 2018, p. 470). Securing complementor engagement, i.e., complementors’ contribution of value-adding complementarities and their compliance with the platform’s rules and processes (Jacobides et al., 2018), is thus the most critical success factor of such organizations (e.g., Boudreau, 2012; Eaton et al., 2015).