Time: 03.06.2020, from 12:15 to 13:45 Uhr, via Zoom

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Daniel Fürstenau, Freie Universität Berlin

Title: Generativity and Growth in Digital Platforms

On Wednesday, 03.06.2020, the Diginomics group is pleased to welcome Prof. Dr. Daniel Fürstenau from Freie Universität Berlin with a lecture on "Generativity and Growth in Digital Platforms" at the Brownbag Seminar. Prof. Dr. Daniel Fürstenau is Assistant Professor at the department of Information Systems with a focus on Digital Transformation and IT Infrastructures. 

If you are interested in participating, please send an email to diginomicsprotect me ?!uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de or rgdnewsprotect me ?!uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de to receive the Zoom meeting-room ID and password.

Abstract. Generativity refers to the ability of a system to spark unbounded growth. This talk analyzes the relationship between generativity and growth in the context of digital platforms that have been opened up for outside developers that work side-by-side with corporate developers. We call this focal phenomenon the extended core. Through an analysis of four e-commerce platforms, we find that these platform’s extended core has exhibited mostly superlinear growth patterns, that the relationship between the generative discussions regarding the platform and platform growth is mediated through two generativity pathways: an internal generativity mechanism limiting contributions to privileged internal developers and an external generativity pathway creating forks and later crossing back the organizational boundary by resubmitting modified changes to the extended core. We further illustrate the generativity-enabling collaboration networks and their evolution using one detailed case example.  The results shed new light on generativity in the context of companies opening up an internal platform to an external digital platform.