ABSTRACT

Although mobile platform ecosystems are highly competitive environments, they provide important entrepreneurial opportunities for app developer organizations. To facilitate app innovations, platform owners regularly release platform boundary resources (PBRs) by adding novel technologies at the platform level. App developer organizations, however, face high levels of technological uncertainty as they create app-level innovations based on PBRs. We examine the effectiveness of the level of distributed sensemaking about PBRs in a context of technological uncertainty arising from either PBR’s technological unrelatedness with prior PBRs or app complexity. Using a dataset of 933 PBR-based app innovations, the findings significantly contribute to our understanding of the duality between competition and cooperation in a platform ecosystem. We demonstrate that distributed sensemaking among app developers, who potentially compete against each other, is crucial for enhancing app competitive performance, especially when technological uncertainty is high. Thus, we encourage greater cooperation among app developer organizations to leverage PBRs.

摘要

尽管移动平台生态系统是竞争激烈的环境，但它们为应用开发者组织提供了重要的创业机会。为了促进应用创新，平台所有者通过在平台级别添加新技术来定期发布平台边界资源 (PBR)。然而，应用程序开发组织在基于 PBR 创建应用程序级创新时面临着高度的技术不确定性。我们在技术不确定性的背景下检验了关于 PBR 的分布式意义构建水平的有效性，这种不确定性是由 PBR 与先前 PBR 的技术无关或应用程序复杂性引起的。使用包含 933 个基于 PBR 的应用程序创新的数据集，这些发现极大地有助于我们理解平台生态系统中竞争与合作之间的二元性。我们证明，潜在的相互竞争的应用程序开发人员之间的分布式意义构建对于提高应用程序的竞争性能至关重要，尤其是在技术不确定性很高的情况下。因此，我们鼓励应用开发者组织之间加强合作以利用 PBR。