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- Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation
Publications
Publications (73)
Extant empirical research on ecosystem alignment has offered little insight into how mature ecosystems align their members with a new value proposition. Our longitudinal empirical study of a seven-year hub-driven alignment initiative within the SOK led retail ecosystem in Finland explores how a mature ecosystem hub attempted to enroll its members i...
The assessment of “ecosystem power” has come to occupy centerstage in anti-
trust cases involving large digital firms, as regulators are finding traditional mar-
ket-by-market analysis increasingly inadequate to capture how competition works between firms holding multiple “assets and capabilities”. While antitrust economics is lagging behind in dev...
Multisided platforms face a fundamental trade‐off: should they ease entry for a larger number of providers of complementary products or services (complementors) to join the platform and benefit from cross‐side network externalities, or should they limit entry to maintain complementors’ incentives to provide high‐quality offerings? We contend that a...
The ability to organize is our most valuable social technology and the successful organizational design of an enterprise can increase its efficiency, effectiveness, and ability to adapt. Modern organizations operate in increasingly complex, dynamic, and global environments, which puts a premium on rapid adaptation. Compared to traditional organizat...
The power of the digital platforms and the increasing scope of their control over individuals and institutions have begun to generate societal concern. However, the ways in which digital platforms exercise power and organize immaturity—defined as the erosion of the individual’s capacity for public use of reason—have not yet been theorized sufficien...
Digital platforms have disrupted many sectors but have not yet visibly transformed highly regulated industries. This study of Big Tech entry in healthcare and education explores how platforms have begun to enter highly regulated industries systematically and effectively. It presents a four-stage process model of platform entry, which we term as “di...
What are the principal consequences on organization and management of the ongoing Digital Revolution? This essay examines how value can be created and captured in fundamentally new ways thanks to digital innovation. I propose that digital platform firms and their ecosystems are the emblematic organizational form of the digital age. I present the ma...
This article explores some of the critical challenges facing self-regulation and the regulatory environment for digital platforms. We examine several historical examples of firms and industries that attempted self-regulation before the Internet. All dealt with similar challenges involving multiple market actors and potentially harmful content or bi...
Clayton Christensen's groundbreaking theory of “disruptive innovation” has proven to be one of the most influential management ideas of the last several decades. In this book, business and management experts—many of them Christensen's colleagues and former students—discuss the innovation challenges that lie ahead. Building on Christensen's work, th...
Digital platforms hold a central position in today's world economy and are said to offer a great potential for the economies and societies in the global South. Yet, to date, the scholarly literature on digital platforms has largely concentrated on business while their developmental implications remain understudied. In part, this is because digital...
This article explores what factors drive digital platform firms to set or modify their boundaries. Building on economics, strategic management, and information systems research, I suggest that digital platforms make strategic decisions over three distinct types of interrelated boundaries: (1) the scope of the platform firm (what assets are owned, w...
Multi-sided platforms (MSPs) have recently drawn considerable research attention, as the influence of platforms is increasingly relevant across a wide array of industries. However, despite theoretical and empirical advances spanning multiple disciplines, several core questions remain about MSPs. This article offers novel insights around platform bu...
Platforms power the world’s most valuable companies, but it will get harder and harder to capture and monetize their disruptive potential. Today, platform companies are in nearly every market, and they all share common features. They use digital technology to create self-sustaining positive-feedback loops that potentially increase the value of thei...
Organizations are simultaneously embedded in inter-organizational networks and ecosystems, yet research on networks and ecosystems developed in isolation. The aim of this partial integration is to bring new energy into maturing research on organizational networks and
greater structure to the burgeoning research on ecosystems. In this article, we un...
We study intergenerational platform‐technology transitions as instances of potentially disruptive innovation at the ecosystem level. Examining the launch of 12 platform technologies in the U.S. videogame industry covering three console generations from 1993 until 2010, we show that incumbents introducing next‐generation platform technologies with a...
Research Summary
The recent surge of interest in “ecosystems” in strategy research and practice has mainly focused on what ecosystems are and how they operate. We complement this literature by considering when and why ecosystems emerge, and what makes them distinct from other governance forms. We argue that modularity enables ecosystem emergence, a...
This paper provides an overview of the main perspectives and themes emerging in research on open innovation (OI). The paper is the result of a collaborative process among several OI scholars – having a common basis in the recurrent Professional Development Workshop on ‘Researching Open Innovation’ at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management....
While a few platforms have garnered significant attention both in the popular press and among academic scholars, there is much we do not know. How many large platforms are operating around the world? Where are they based? What sectors do they populate? How many people do they employ? To better understand the global growth and scope of platform comp...
This article reviews the literature on platforms and sheds light on the design principles, economics fundamentals, and business strategies associated with platforms. We divide the discussion into two main types: product platforms designed by individual companies or assemblers of closed supply chains to develop new products or services on the basis...
The importance of the role of services in the new economy has already been widely accepted. Many industrial firms are increasingly competing on the basis of value delivered by shifting their market share from delivering pure-products to delivering product-services (Wise and Baumgartner 1999; Neely, 2008). This is linked to the view that industrial...
This paper develops a set of hypotheses on the drivers of platform boundary shifts, which can be later tested by future scholars. After presenting a literature review on platform research, we identify as platform boundaries: platform scope, and platform technological interfaces. We conceptualize these platform boundaries as types of organizational...
The last few years, we have seen a rapid increase in the interest on “ecosystems”, “platforms”, and “industry architectures”. Motivated by changes in the nature of the competitive environment, regulatory and technological change, social scientists have sought to find new ways to describe the structure of the “aggregate” level that firms compete in,...
An integrative framework is proposed to advance management research on technological platforms, bridging two theoretical perspectives: economics, which sees platforms as double-sided markets, and engineering design, which sees platforms as technological architectures. While the economic perspective informs our understanding of platform competition,...
This article provides insights on how to manage collective innovation in the digital economy, an innovation regime which is riddled with complex regulatory challenges and increasing litigation over intellectual property rights. Private collective organizations face two main challenges: (1) to promote collective innovation while preserving the priva...
This paper brings together the recent literature on industry platforms and shows how it relates to managing innovation within and outside the firm as well as to dealing with technological and market disruptions and change over time. First, we identify distinct types of platforms. Our analysis of a wide range of industry examples suggests that there...
In this article, we explore some of the forms of institutional work that organizations perform as they participate externally in the processes that drive change in the institutional logic that characterizes their field, and as they respond internally to the shift as it occurs. More specifically, we present the results of an in-depth case study of I...
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Annabelle Gawer presents cutting-edge contributions from 24 top international scholars from 19 universities across Europe, the USA and Asia, from the disciplines of strategy, economics, innovation, organization studies and knowledge management. The novel insights assembled in this volume constitute a fundamental step towards an empirically based, n...
What factors and processes drive value appropriation and value creation in interdependent industry ecosystems? This paper explores this issue through a case study comparing the deployment of the i-mode mobile Internet service in two countries, seeking the reasons behind its contrasting fortunes: spectacular success in Japan vs failure in Europe. Th...
"This paper explores Intel's strategy with respect to complements. We find that, as the literature predicts, Intel's entry decisions are shaped by the belief that it does not have the capabilities to enter all possible markets, and thus that it must encourage widespread entry despite the fact that potential entrants (rationally) fear Intel's abilit...
This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.
Presentation at ITC semiannual meeting, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK, June 12-13, 1997
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (p. 302-313). by Annabelle Gawer. Ph.D.
This paper analyzes the ways in which the industry architecture affects the deployment of a platform, focusing on the i-mode mobile internet service in Japan and Europe. We find that by comparing differences in roles that actors perform across regions -operationalized in terms of scope, relationships and bargaining power -we can understand differen...
Innovation in the cloud is challenging Europe's telecoms industry and its regulatory system. The shift from 'desktop to data centre' and the provision of computing in the form of a service means that cloud offerings are increasingly dependent on the quality of the underlying communications infrastructure. Critical parts of the infrastructure are re...
Today high-tech markets are battlegrounds for platform leadership. This article offers a comprehensive strategy toolkit for platform leader wannabes. It answers four questions : (1) How to decide whether to pursue a platform or a product strategy? (2) What steps to follow to become a platform leader? (3)What strategy should I follow if I want to di...
