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Entrepreneurship in Digital Platforms: A Network-Centric View

Srinivasan, A and N Venkataraman (2018). Entrepreneurship in Digital Platforms: A Network-Centric View, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 12(1), 54-71.

Research on entrepreneurship has focused primarily on the individual characteristics of founders in driving the success of new ventures offering stand-alone products and/or services. In recent years, we have seen an increase in entrepreneurship in digital platforms—where success requires positioning products and services within dynamic digital networks that depict complex connections among platforms, complementary modules, and consumers. This article introduces key elements of a theory for settings where entrepreneurship success is intricately connected to the moves of other entrepreneurs and coordinated within and across platforms. We introduce a network-centric view to understand how entrepreneurs occupying the role of third-party developers support digital platforms by their choices to link to them. Furthermore, we develop propositions reflecting a dynamic perspective representing two key stages of competition in digital platforms, initial launch, and scale-up. We hope this work guides further theorizing and empirical research in digital platforms and entrepreneurship in general.

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