Ambidextrous Digital Platforms: Balancing Control And Emergence

A digital platform (e.g. Facebook) is a stable technical core that can be augmented by third-parties (e.g. game developers on Facebook platform) to provide their primarily digital services. Digital platforms are subject to a delicate tension between maintaining control (to ensure stability of the technical core) and simultaneously stimulating generativity and emergence (to attract as many third-parties as possible). While pure control makes adaptation difficult, pure emergence comes at the cost of experimentation without gaining associated benefits. This study goes beyond such an either-or approach to theorize the balance between control and emergence in ambidextrous digital platforms. With aim of developing both descriptive and prescriptive theories and drawing on both organizational ambidexterity and complex adaptive systems as theoretical lenses, we expect to provide a thorough description of the dynamics, determinants, and design configurations through which platform owners simultaneously manage and legitimate a balanced co-existence of top-down control and bottom-up emergence.