The Evolution Paths of Neutral Host Businesses: Antecedents, Strategies, and Business Models

A neutral host company provides wholesale infrastructure sharing services through digital platforms to the downstream-markets enabling customers to take advantage of economies of scale and to access knowledge assets. Through a qualitative study of more than 50 businesses, the analysis of neutral host business antecedents, emergent company strategies, and ecosystem business models reveal that the markets of data and communications are highly fragmented, different, and diversified, but the categorization of business traits suggests the attribution of typical underlying business and investment decisions. The policy implication is that to enable asset sharing, the markets should not be constrained through a local-monopoly prohibiting regulation, but additional innovation fostering practices shall be implemented to provide further social benefits and business consolidation opportunities before dominant designs emerge. On the global level, increased collaboration among policy makers is needed to ensure the parallel evolution of local digital platform regulatory frameworks.