Inhibitors and Enablers of Leverage in Digital Industrial Platform Ecosystems

Digital platforms have demonstrated their disruptive power across various domains, and an increasing number of manufacturing firms have embarked on establishing digital industrial platforms for emerging technologies like the Industrial Internet of Things. Given the technical and organizational complexity of digital industrial platforms, the ways in which complementors can create value by interacting and engaging with them may differ for these platforms. Drawing on a case study conducted at a large multinational platform provider, the article explores how complementors can use digital industrial platforms to their advantage. To this end, the study adopts the concept of leverage, which refers to the ability of platform ecosystems to exert a significant degree of impact that is disproportionate to the input required. The findings indicate that complementors currently primarily benefit from production leverage, utilizing the platform as a technological foundation for individual solutions. However, the utilization of the platform as a marketplace for innovative and generically distributable applications that benefit from innovation and transaction leverage is limited. This is due to a variety of inhibitors, which the platform owner tries to mitigate via enablers through deliberate governance in the form of boundary resources. By unveiling domain-specific manifestations, inhibitors, and enablers across different types of leverage, the study contextualizes leverage within the domain of digital industrial platforms and stresses the need for adopting platform and ecosystem thinking and providing relational governance mechanisms. In addition, it extends the notion of architectural leverage by emphasizing the leveraging ecosystem and its governance through the deliberate orchestration of complementor engagement and underscoring ecosystem leverage based on value co-creation and coordination.