The impact of multilateral competitive and cooperative relationships in the platform ecosystem on the iterative innovation of platform-dependent enterprises: findings from NCA and fsQCA

Purpose Under the immense pressure of rapid digital technology development, increasingly crowded competitive markets and growing complexity in interactive relationships, platform-dependent enterprises that rely on digital platforms for survival are facing severe challenges. Maintaining iterative innovation and gaining a competitive advantage in the face of complex and ever-changing interactive relationships is an important issue worthy of study. Therefore, based on the theory of competition and cooperation, this paper focuses on enhancing the agility and quality of iterative innovation in platform-dependent enterprises by configuring and managing multilateral competition and cooperation relationships within the platform ecosystem. Design/methodology/approach We selected 200 developers using Apple iOS in China as our sample and examined the competitive and cooperative relationships among platform-dependent enterprises, platform owners, other platform-dependent enterprises and users. We employed necessity condition analysis (NCA) to identify the necessary conditions for achieving high iterative innovation agility and quality and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the antecedent configurations that facilitate iterative innovation agility and quality. Findings First, NCA demonstrates that establishing non-competitive relationships with other platform-dependent enterprises is a necessary condition for achieving high-quality iterative innovation. Secondly, the fsQCA model reveals the antecedent configuration that enterprises can achieve high iterative innovation quality and high iterative innovation agility. The results show that maintaining a cooperative relationship between enterprises and platform owners, as well as other platform-dependent enterprises, can usually achieve high iterative innovation agility. When competing with platform owners, collaborating with users and other platform-dependent enterprises simultaneously can also achieve high iterative innovation agility. Maintaining non-competitive relationships with other platform-dependent companies, cooperating with users or collaborating simultaneously with platform owners and other dependent companies can achieve high-quality iterative innovation. Research limitations/implications This paper examines how managing and configuring multilateral competitive and cooperative relationships within a platform ecosystem can enable enterprises to achieve high-quality and agile iterative innovation. It supplements and expands existing iterative innovation literature from a configuration perspective. Furthermore, it reminds managers to pay attention to the synergistic and substitutive roles of multilateral competitive and cooperative relationships within platform ecosystems, providing practical insights for managers to improve the agility and quality of iterative innovation. Originality/value Although the platform ecosystem has always been a research hotspot, platform-dependent enterprises are often ignored. At the same time, most studies only consider the impact of a single factor. Therefore, this study employs fsQCA and NCA methods to investigate how platform-dependent enterprises manage the multilateral competition and cooperation relationships they face from a multi-factor configuration perspective to achieve high iterative innovation quality and agility. The research results provide new insights into the factors that affect the iterative innovation of enterprises and also highlight the importance of managers in attaching importance to and managing multilateral competition and cooperation.