Implementation of Platform Governance Mechanisms: Insights from a B2B Platform Ecosystem

Platform ecosystems are complex ecologies of firms with individual, sometimes conflicting, interests and goals. A platform owner as orchestrator of the ecosys-tem needs to constantly align the ecosystem actors’ individual interests towards common objectives. To achieve such alignment of interests, platform owners rely on a purposefully defined governance structure, which is implemented through a set of governance mechanisms. Despite a variety of mechanisms being discussed in the existing research, little is known about platform owners’ main activities to implement such mechanisms in their specific platform contexts, particularly in a B2B platform ecosystem context. To bridge this gap, we conduct an in-depth study of Salesforce, a thriving B2B platform ecosystem in the enterprise software industry. We find that the platform owner made significant resource investments to implement governance mechanisms based on innovative activities and we pro-vide detailed empirical accounts on each of the main activities. Our findings indi-cate that governance mechanisms are implemented differently in B2B platform ecosystems compared to consumer-focused platform ecosystems, which should be examined in more detail by future research.