Overview
Digital platforms are vital to society's economic growth and resilience and have largely changed the way people live. They facilitate transactions and match participants by leveraging information technology and network effects, playing a dominant role in modern business practice. Many new digital platforms are created, by start-up firms or industry incumbents, but most of them do not survive through the early stage.This Project is dedicated to a comprehensive and timely investigation of how digital platforms can rapidly grow their user base and expand revenue at the early stage, and how they can support their complementors to thrive on both traditional and social e-commerce platforms.
Research Objectives
PO1. The Platform Perspective
- Investigate how digital platforms can rapidly grow the user base at the platform’s early stage through competitive actions and legitimation efforts.
- Investigate how digital platforms can rapidly grow revenue at the platform’s early stage through platform-enabled operation management.
- Application: Design and launch a LawTech platform.
PO2. The E-Commerce Complementor Perspective
- Investigate how digital platform complementors can improve performance by
- configuring platform-based competitive actions as a repertoire.
- differentiating platform-based competitive action repertoire from rivals.
- adapting platform-enabled competitive action repertoire over time.
- changing the platform feature of the online store location.
PO3. The Social E-Commerce Complementor Perspective
- Investigate how social media influencers leverage social platform ecosystems for content creation and product selection for better performance.
- The role of one-stop e-commerce service platforms in facilitating product development/selection and content creation, guiding, and maintaining a virtuous cycle.
- Comparing and analyzing the optimal operation model and fee model of the platforms.
