Jens Foerderer

Knowledge Boundaries in Enterprise Software Platform Development: Antecedents and Consequences for Platform Governance

The widespread uptake of platform strategies turns many vendors of enterprise software into curators of an ecosystem of firms that collaboratively develop and commercialize a shared technology. As a platform owners effectiveness in integrating knowledge across ecosystem participants will distinguish it from its competitors, we investigate the management of development‐related knowledge across firm boundaries. Our exploratory, multiple‐case study of 4 platforms illustrates how “knowledge boundaries” emerge between platform owners and complementors. We observe that knowledge boundaries are influenced by a platforms functional extent, interface design, and evolutionary dynamics, which create differences, dependencies, and novelty of development knowledge, resulting in qualitatively distinct types of knowledge boundaries. To overcome knowledge boundaries, platform owners provide various resources at the boundary, including information portals, documentation, helpdesks, and alignment workshops. We observe that in shaping these resources, platform owners face a trade‐off between providing knowledge at the right scope, while allowing for the scalability of knowledge resources for the entire ecosystem. Depending on their scope and scale, we classify knowledge boundary resources as broadcasting, brokering, and bridging, each representing qualitatively distinct patterns in managing knowledge in platform ecosystems. We conclude with implications for researchers and managers.

Does Platform Owner’s Entry Crowd Out Innovation? Evidence from Google Photos

We study how platform owners’ decision to enter complementary markets affects innovation in the ecosystem surrounding the platform. Despite heated debates on the behavior of platform owners toward complementors, relatively little is known about the mechanisms linking platform owners’ entry and complementary innovation. We exploit Google’s 2015 entry into the market for photography apps on its own Android platform as a quasi-experiment. We conclude based on our analyses of a time-series panel of 6,620 apps that Google’s entry was associated with a substantial increase in complementary innovation. We estimate that the entry caused a 9.6% increase in the likelihood of major updates for apps affected by Google’s entry, compared to similar but not affected apps. Further analyses suggest that Google’s entry triggered complementary innovation because of the increased consumer attention for photography apps, instead of competitive “racing” or “Red Queen” effects. This attention spillover effect was particularly p...

Signals of Novelty and their Legitimacy

Signaling novelty can be an important mechanism of organizations to sustain audience appeal. We investigate when audiences perceive novelty as a quality of products. Our theoretical arguments combine the organizational literature on market signals with the work on categories, the main streams that this study contributes to. Difference-in-difference analyses of app producers’ update behavior in Google Play U.S., the largest market for mobile apps, confirm our hypothesis that novelty can be a normative value and belief of audiences: App producers implicitly make choices about signaling novelty when releasing updates for their apps and they face varying constraints of within-category mobility that determine the legitimacy of their updates. Whereas minor updates are appealing when within-category mobility is low, that is when exchanges are considered to be stable and long-lived, they are less appealing with increasing within-category mobility. By contrast, major updates yield significant audience appeal when ...