Research Summary We examine how an incumbent firm navigates internal and external uncertainties when entering a nascent platform ecosystem. Drawing on a longitudinal study of a large telecommunication firm's transition into an evolving IoT ecosystem, we advance a cognitive perspective on platform strategy. We explain how managers' cognitive frames shape platform scope decisions based on shifting assumptions and interpretations of ecosystem dynamics and internal capabilities. Our process model shows how deviations between expected and actual developments trigger changes in managers' attitudes toward uncertainty, thereby shifting their cognitive frames and prompting them to modify platform scope strategies, leading to oscillation between shaping and adapting strategic postures. Our theorization sheds light on the cognitive foundations of platform strategy and the dynamics of incumbent platform transitions in a nascent ecosystem.Managerial Summary Incumbents often enter nascent digital ecosystems by introducing a platform, yet uncertainty complicates decisions about the appropriate platform scope. Our nine-year study of TELECO's IoT platform reveals three takeaways. First, scope is not a one-off decision; it evolves as managers revisit assumptions about opportunities and constraints. Second, scope decision rarely move linearly; firms oscillate between broad and calibrated scopes, creating episodes of overreach and retrenchment. Third, interpretations of uncertainty steer these shifts: reading uncertainty as an opportunity supports shaping bets, whereas interpreting it as a constraint encourages adaptation and selective coopetition. Overall, platform decisions in uncertain ecosystems reflect organizational tensions as firms balance ambitions for dominance against market realities and the actions of ecosystem members.

The phenomenon of a platform owner entering its complementor spaces has been growing and, given its potential impact on the dynamics of competition in platform-mediated industries, has captured the interest of entrepreneurs, scholars, and policy makers. Empirical studies on the consequences of such platform owner entry have been scant so far and show mixed results for complementors. Drawing on competitive dynamics theory, our paper revisits an implicit assumption held in extant studies that allows us to hypothesize on dissimilar entry modes across owners, to study the implications of entry mode differences. We argue that how an owner enters its complementor spaces drives the level of competitive pressure that such an entry exerts on the affected complementors. In turn, this determines the size and valence of the repercussions on complementors’ product performance as well as their responses. Drawing on platform theory, we argue that an owner’s mode of entry into complementor spaces relates to that owner’s approach to platform governance. Using a unique panel dataset of health and fitness mobile apps in the Apple iOS and Google Play store, our results support our prediction that the mode of entry plays a significant role in the resulting complementor dynamics. We find contrasting modes of entry and resulting dynamics that arise between a platform that follows a closed and reigning approach to governance and one that follows an open and laissez-faire approach. Our findings help explain apparent contradictions in prior studies and extend our understanding of this increasingly common phenomenon in platform-mediated industries.

Recently, management research has started to investigate an important complementor strategy in platform-mediated markets, i.e., multihoming. We extend this stream of research by focusing on the timing strategies of complementors’ in multihoming decisions. Specifically, we study the drivers of the timing of complementors’ sequential multihomings, that is, the factors that impact the timing of a complementor’s first and subsequent multihoming. Our empirical context is the ecosystem of platforms and complementors in the smart home market. Our analyses show that early entrants are faster to multihome for the first time (i.e., join a second platform) than late entrants, which suggests a hedging strategy to cope with higher levels of uncertainty in an early stage of ecosystem development. However, we find that the drivers of multihoming timing change over time. While the market traction of non-adopted platforms positively influences how quickly complementors multihome for the first time, after initial multihoming, complementors are faster to multihome again if the non-adopted platforms are technologically closer to the platforms they have already joined. We discuss the implications of our findings for complementor strategies.

Technological innovation can disrupt the competitive landscape of an industry and the performance differential of incumbents and their challengers. The challenge for both is to adapt to their changing competitive conditions and environmental dynamics. Adaptation necessitates timely responses, rapid and flexible product innovation, and ambidexterity i.e. managing over time the tension between exploitation for short term gains and exploration for long term improvement in performance. This paper develops a model of innovation and competition in Formula 1 racing where technology development, new team entry, organizational and supplier changes, and annual regulation changes place a premium on ambidexterity as a dynamic capability for firm adaptation. Simulation results show how firm level and environmental changes such as organizational changes and resource acquisition, influence team capability development and erosion and can alter the intra industry performance differential in favour of incumbents or their challengers.

Strategy scholars have long investigated entry timing advantages, in particular the mechanisms, environmental conditions and firm-level resources and capabilities that are associated with the success of early and late entrant competitors. Research has not been conclusive on the existence of first mover advantage, which has led several scholars to propose the existence of first mover disadvantage and to propose specific times of entry (e.g. a fast second) that could more likely lead to advantage. Data limitations in most extant empirical work confines the study of entry timing strategies. Our paper attempts to overcome some of those limitations by integrating many of the strategic entry timing dimensions into a conceptual framework and a model which allows us to explore a range of competitive outcomes associated with different entry strategies. Our analysis also departs from the outsized focus on first movers in the literature, presenting the implications on the later entrant strategies.

Platform-mediated industries have created large markets for complementor firms, resulting in vigorous intra-platform competition among them. On digital platforms, complementor competition tends to focus on products (end users often know the product name but not that of the complementor). Product strategy in platform complementor markets is therefore an important yet understudied topic. A key product strategy dimension is that of product complexity because adding features on digital platforms is facilitated by the intrinsic flexibility of software-based products and low appropriability regimes. Moreover, extant research suggests that product features are a major determinant of the level of demand for a complementor product. This paper addresses this research gap by exploring how product complexity affects the performance of digital platform complementors. We examine complementors’ performances from two perspectives, namely demand and operations, because it is the combination of the two that ultimately drives the impact on complementors’ performances. With regard to demand, we argue that product complexity has a positive association with perceived product quality, but an inverted U-shaped relationship with consumers’ product engagement. With regard to operations, we contend that product complexity increases the frequency of product maintenance while decreasing the speed of product adaptation to platform-wide changes. We test our hypotheses empirically in the context of a health and fitness application ecosystem in the Apple iOS App Store via a multi-method approach. We run panel data analyses on a manually collected dataset, supplemented with two online experiments to explore the underlying mechanisms behind our arguments, and to address endogeneity concerns.

Digitalization is profoundly changing the process of value creation and capture. Not only can value creation and capture now take a more diverse set of forms and outcomes, but the core drivers of this process, including resources and capabilities, business models, the competitive and collaborative landscape, and the basis of competition, may be subject to fundamental change due to digitalization. In some sectors, such as newspapers and media, digitalization has already led to fundamental transformations in value creation and capture, while in others, such as mining, the changes generated so far are proving more sustaining and evolutionary in nature. This panel gathers top digitalization experts from the key management communities – innovation, strategy, and entrepreneurship – as well as industry experts to examine how our existing frameworks of value creation and capture are changing in the digital age. The final outcome of the panel will be an audience vote on whether the advent of digitalization requires a fundamental re-examination of the existing value creation, value capture paradigm, or an incremental update.

When an existing market space is challenged by creative disruptions (Schumpeter, 1942), organizations need to strategically re-position themselves in both material and value space. Material space encompasses an innovation’s physical attribute, practice, or design, whereas value space represents how the innovation is judged, evaluated, or imbued with meanings. Navigating these two spaces simultaneously can be difficult. This symposium seeks to understand how firms manage conflicts across material space and value space during technological innovation. We include four papers to examine how 1) firms bring values to technological innovation through technology positioning in material space, and how 2) institutional structures that establish orders for material space affect valuation of technological innovation during commercialization. These four papers employ a variety of methods – ranging from archival, qualitative, and quantitative – to study these issues. Authors of this symposium are experts on the proposed theme and have extensively published on innovation, value, and meaning creation. We believe this symposium will advance the field by proposing a holistic approach to examine technological innovation. Back to the Future: Technology Re-emergence through the Lens of Music Synthesizers Presenter: Andrew Nelson; U. of Oregon Presenter: Callen Anthony; New York U. Presenter: Mary Tripsas; Boston College Product Differentiation Along the Technology Lifecycle Presenter: Stine Grodal; Boston U. Presenter: Fernando Suarez; Northeastern U. Ambiguity, Typicality, Misclassification, and Valuation: Deep Learning for Tech Innovation Position Presenter: Balazs Kovacs; Yale School of Management Presenter: Gael Le Mens; U. Pompeu Fabra Presenter: Michael Hannan; Professor at Stanford U. Graduate School of Business The Entrepreneurial Commercialization of Academic Science: Evidence from “Twin” Discoveries Presenter: Matt Marx; Boston U. Questrom School of Business Presenter: David Hsu; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania

Recent research has emphasized that signaling clear membership in product categories influences how products perform. In this paper we focus on two shortcomings in the categorization literature. First, while prior literature has focused primarily on category labels as signals of categorical membership, other mechanisms that communicate association to a category–such as semantic networks and images–have been under-researched. We draw on the literature on multi-modal processing of information to explain how text-based mechanisms such as the use of labels and semantic networks differ from visual-based mechanisms such as the use of images. Second, the prior literature has overlooked the asymmetry in the effect of positive and negative labels on performance. We draw on an extensive literature within psychology to argue that negative labels have a stronger effect on performance than positive labels. Using original data from the crowdfunding website Indiegogo from 2010 to 2015, we find that both text-based mechanisms, semantic networks and labels, and visual mechanisms of signaling category membership are associated with performance. Our findings also suggest that images convey category membership by activating different cognitive structures than text. Furthermore, we find that labels with negative valence have a stronger effect on performance than positive labels. Our study theorizes and provides empirical support for a more complete understanding of how producers can signal categorical membership to shape the performance of their products.

The literature on technology management has increasingly focused on the sociocognitive elements of the industry life cycle. One of these elements, category labels (words, in most cases) and its role in shaping market understandings, has recently become of interest to scholars. As industries evolve, stakeholders generate a plethora of category labels. However, we know relatively little about why some category labels are used repeatedly, whereas others are abandoned. Drawing on semantic networks theory, we argue that the familiarity and creativity of category labels drive their adoption. We hypothesize that low levels of familiarity hinder comprehension, but too much familiarity increases the cost of obviousness. Likewise, low levels of creativity do not trigger curiosity, whereas too much creativity spurs dissonance. We use two methods to address these hypotheses. First, we study the early smartphone industry, finding support for an inverted U-shaped relationship between both the familiarity and creativity of category labels and their adoption, even after controlling for alternative explanations, such as technology and design characteristics. Second, we find consistent results through two online experiments that broaden the scope of our study and address potential endogeneity concerns in our field data. Our paper expands the literature on the evolution of technology industries by showing that familiarity and creativity are distinct dimensions that influence the sociocognitive dynamics of an emerging industry. We also contribute to the categorization literature by theorizing about the contestation that occurs among category labels and providing empirical evidence of the factors that affect their adoption.

Platform-based ecosystems are a vital source of innovation and value creation in today’s economy. Accordingly, scholars and practitioners are becoming increasingly interested in studying strategies and performance of firms that participate in these ecosystems. Given the recent explosion of research in this area, we have assembled a panel of experts to take stock of the current research and to provide direction for future research. The discussion would entail the highlights of the SMJ Special Issue on the Platform Ecosystems by one of the editors and the presentations from a set of experts highlighting multiple theoretical perspectives and industry contexts that scholars can use to conduct research in the area of the platform-based ecosystems.

Understanding how organizations operate in different environments has been at the core of organizational research for decades. Three distinct bodies of literature have emerged, with limited cross-pollination among them: routines, heuristics, and improvisation. We add to the existing literature by studying these three types of organizational responses simultaneously via an in-depth longitudinal study of an organization that encountered increasing levels of environmental dynamism. We pay particular attention to explaining how and why routines broke down, prompting the emergence of heuristics or improvisations, as well as when these three responses were used in tandem and when they interacted with each other. Our theoretical model identifies the triggers of heuristics and improvisations and the focal context that led to routines breaking down. We define "focal context" as a constructed temporary reality that encompasses both the objective traits of the environment experienced by the organization at a particular point in time, as well as the subjective perceptions that organizational members had of that reality. We also identify the mechanisms of cognitive search and social convergence that led to the creation of nonroutine responses. Finally, we use our insights to clarify the existing overlaps in the conceptualization of the three organizational responses. Our field study is based on a mountaineering expedition to climb one of the most difficult sides of Mount Everest, the Kangshung face, an archetypical case that is particularly well suited to the development of a new theory in which rich data are required to study the phenomena.

James Utterback's research has had a major impact on the work of both scholars and practitioners interested in the strategic management of technology and innovation. His pioneering studies with the late William Abernathy produced a powerful yet parsimonious model to understand how industries evolve and how the organizations within an industry must change over time in order to succeed and survive. Their work remains one of the pillars of a large stream of literature that deals with what has come to be called industry evolution or industry lifecycle theory.

Mature companies often lack the vision and resolve to fully commit to new technologies - even when consumers are ready for them. This leads companies to develop watered-down products with limited capabilities and leaves them exposed to upstart competitors.