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PublicationTaming Complexity in Business Ecosystems: Investigating the Role of Platforms( 2021)
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PublicationInvestigating B2B Innovation Platforms from a Complexity Perspective: A Simulation-based Approach(Universität St. Gallen, 2023-02-20)B2B innovation platforms serve as increasingly popular venues for value creation of firms. Such innovation platforms facilitate the generation of innovation between multiple partners in the form of multi-partner innovation (MPI). MPI is generally a complex process that poses several challenges. Through their offered leverages, B2B innovation platforms are assumed to tame these complexity challenges and foster MPI outcomes. Thus, B2B innovation platforms create a novel and promising organizing logic in the context of MPI. The circumstances under which B2B platform leverages tame complexity challenges posed by MPI processes in business ecosystems have not been investigated, however. Thus, this dissertation aims to examine the roles of B2B platform leverages in taming complexity challenges and to specify whether and how platforms truly are a promising organizing logic. To this end, complexity science is applied as a theoretical foundation to understand how complexity emerges and why it causes challenges in business ecosystems. Subsequently, agent-based modeling is employed as a research method to account for the interrelations of the central constructs, model the resulting complexity, and conduct simulation experiments to derive new theoretical insights. The developed simulation model and the interpretation of its results is iteratively refined over the dissertations constituent papers. The resulting contributions constitute an extendible agent-based model of a B2B innovation platform within a complex business ecosystem as well as several theoretical insights. For research, the derived findings indicate that the ecosystem-level complexity of a business ecosystem represents a major contingency for B2B platform leverages ability to tame complexity challenges. MPI complexity triggers distinct regions of complexity in the business ecosystem, and B2B platform leverages are found to only tame complexity challenges in the region of emergent complexity. For practitioners, the results imply that B2B innovation platforms are not uniformly disruptive to all industry contexts. The ecosystem-level complexity in a given business ecosystem should be accounted for, as it may determine when investing into a B2B innovation platform and adopting a platform organizing logic is particularly promising.
