The Emergence of Digital Platform Ecosystems: A Problem-Solving Perspective

In digital platforms value is co-created by platform sponsors and complementors and fundamental to such co-creation is a shared understanding of the scope of activities of the respective actors. The platform sponsors’ choice of scope is critical at the initial stage to attract participation of the autonomous complementors although neither the complementors nor the complements are known ex- ante. In this paper, we address how a platform sponsor’s choice of scope can attract complementors and facilitate the emergence of an ecosystem. Using the problem-solving perspective, we demonstrate that for successful emergence of de novo ecosystems the platform sponsors’ choice of activity scope should be aligned with the problem they seek to solve. We test our arguments, using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on a dataset of crowdfunding campaigns of aspiring platform sponsors, and identify multiple pathways, representing distinct configurations of problem dimensions and scope, for successful emergence of ecosystem around incipient platforms.