Digital Platforms: A Review and Future Directions

Digital Platforms: A Review and Future Directions:- Abstract

The increasing adoption of digital platforms as a new mode of organizing economic and

social activities has led to a growing interest in research on this topic amongst IS scholars.

As a result, the digital platforms literature has grown significantly over the last decade. Yet,

scholars call for more research on the topic as platforms evolve and many questions remain

unanswered. There is therefore a need to take stock of the existing literature in order to gain

better visibility of what has been achieved and what directions future research can take. We

conducted a systematic review of the literature on digital platforms including 96 articles,

covering IS and management journals. Key findings of this study show an ambiguity in the

current conceptualization of digital platforms. They also highlight the multi-dimensional

nature of digital platforms which reflects the heterogeneity of their manifestations in

practice.

Keywords: Literature review, Digital platforms, Platform design and deployment, Platform adoption

and outcomes, Definitions of digital platform, Future directions

Introduction

Digital platforms have become a major mode for organizing a wide range of human activities,

including economic, social, and political interactions (e.g., Tan et al. 2015; Kane et al. 2014). In

particular, the rise of digital platforms has transformed the landscape of multiple industries such as

transportation (e.g., Uber, Grab), hospitality (e.g., Airbnb, CouchSurfing), and software development

(e.g., Apple iOS, Google android). Enterprises that have leveraged the affordances of digital platforms

have achieved significant growth in size and scale. For instance, digital platform providers in the areas

of e-commerce and software development have attained more than $700 billion in market value

(Evans and Gawer 2016). As a result, digital platforms have become an attractive business model and

strategy, and a promising engine of economic growth for a number of sectors.

The prominence of this phenomenon and its dependence on IT capabilities have led to increasing

interest in researching digital platforms amongst Information Systems (IS) scholars (e.g., Tiwana

2015; Kwark et al. 2017; Markus and Loebbecke 2013; Parker et al. 2017). Prior empirical and

conceptual studies have examined platforms from different angles, such as the growth of platform-

Literature Review on Digital Platform

Twenty-Second Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems, Japan 2018

based ecosystems (Jha et al. 2016), the governance of platforms (Boudreau 2010), the adoption of

platform strategies (Hagiu and Wright 2015), and the impact of digital platforms on society (Chan and

Ghose 2014). However, despite these important advances in our understanding of digital platforms,

The Founder and CEO of Digiprima, became an electrical engineer at a time when women in tech was not how it is today. After graduating from Maulana Azad NIT (a regional engineering college), Bhopal, in 1989, she made the switch to software engineerin