Platform-based ecosystems : leveraging the two faces of business ecosystems

In many business ecosystems, the collaboration between participants of open innovation is facilitated by platforms. These socio-technical artifacts support open innovation strategies, facilitating openness and sharing, thus fostering the emergence and development of catalytic reactions between the various participants. Business ecosystems are evolving and dynamic. They typically have two complementary subsystems, the first one relates to the innovation dimension of the ecosystem while the second refers to the commercial development of the ecosystem. However, there is still a lack of understanding of business ecosystems dynamics in general. Existing accounts of ecosystem dynamics are quite scarce in the academic literature and they do not systematically acknowledge these two subsystems. Our contribution fills this gap by developing a conceptual framework to describe and analyze these ecosystem dynamics in different subsystems and their interactions. Four case studies show the applicability of our framework for illustrating the different choices that platform providers make in doing so.