Toward A Design Framework For Service-Platform Ecosystems

The emergence of digital platforms disrupts the way we communicate, interact, and utilize services. We increasingly find ourselves in a world shifting away from Goods-Dominant (G-D) toward Service-Dominant (S-D) logic. One crucial aspect of this is the way we will use mobility in the future. In the past, we relied on goods in the form of privately owned cars to travel from point A to point B. However, platforms such as Uber, Lyft, DriveNow, and car2go change the way we use mobility from owning a car to using mobility as a service (MaaS). Although we have gathered knowledge about how to optimize production processes in the G-D world, how to design successful platform ecosystems from an S-D perspective is unclear. In this article, we took a design science research approach to developing a framework that helps scholars to systematically compare, and practitioners to design, a mobility service platform ecosystem (MSPE). First, we started with a literature review to ground the artifact in S-D and MaaS research. We then developed the framework iteratively, drawing from literature and two case studies representing a public and private mobility platform. The resulting artifact is a first step toward providing a structural, reproducible framework to design MSPEs that ensures comparability across platform ecosystems.