Open innovation, information, and entrepreneurship within platform ecosystems

Research SummaryCompanies sponsor platform ecosystems as an open innovation strategy to encourage complementors to develop complementary products, services, or technologies that can add value to the platform ecosystem. In this study, we develop and test an information-based theory of entrepreneurial activity within platform ecosystems. We postulate that ecosystems produce different types of informationa subset of which will foster entrepreneurship in the form of the commercialization of complementary products that were previously released for free. Our results indicate that product-specific information is associated with commercialization, but we fail to detect a relationship between market information and subsequent commercialization activity. Managerial SummaryThe digital economy has led to a proliferation of platform ecosystems that harness external innovation. These ecosystems rely on complementors who enhance the value of platforms by creating complementary technologies. Hence, complementors' commercial viability is important. One such type of ecosystem is an app store, which enables complementors to introduce software that improves the platform product. App stores exist for a variety of software platforms, ranging from mobile phone operating systems (iOS and Android) to electronic medical record systems (Epic and Cerner). In this research, we find that complementors who introduce a free version of a mobile app are more likely to commercialize their app in response to specific types of information and platform designers should manage information in their platforms to foster platform viability.