Digital platform organizations have become integral to everyday life, delivering services and products while reshaping entire industries. Yet platforms are only one manifestation of a broader phenomenon: digital business ecosystems. These ecosystems extend beyond single firms or platforms, encompassing networks of users, complementors, institutions, and infrastructures that together create, transform, and distribute value.
Value Creation in Digital Platforms and Business Ecosystems addresses the complexity of how both digital platforms and business ecosystems create and deliver value in the networks they construct, facilitate and control. Drawing on cutting-edge research from the international academic community, it provides an in-depth investigation of the mechanisms, dimensions, and challenges of value creation in digital contexts. This timely volume explores questions such as: How do digital platforms reconfigure traditional value chains? In what ways do ecosystems enable new forms of collaboration, entrepreneurial activity, and cultural participation? What tensions emerge when ecosystems foster innovation but also create dependencies, exclusion, or algorithmic bias? How do ecosystems affect labour markets, sustainability, and the blurring of boundaries between the physical and virtual?
It will be an essential reference text for researchers, students and practitioners interested in the theoretical aspects and practical applications of value creation in digital platform and business ecosystems.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction Part I - Platform-Based Organizations: Conceptualizations, Opportunities and Challenges for Value Creation 2. Conceptual Foundations of Understanding Value Creation in Digital Business Ecosystems 3. The Digital Platform Company from a Schumpeterian Perspective 4. The Digital Shadow Economy: Threats and Challenges for the Information Ecosystems 5. New Platform of Value Creation in the Age of AI Part II - Platform Competition and Strategies for Value Creation 6. Digital Platform Strategies for Value Creation and Capture: Strategic Positioning and Competitive Dynamics in Network-Based Markets 7. Competition of Local Marketplaces in the Face of Global Rivals 8. Sustainability and Value Creation of Transaction Platforms in Emerging Markets: A Comparative Analysis of On-Demand Grocery Platforms Part III: Business Models and Markets 9. From Bricks to Clicks: Intermediation and the Shift in Value Creation Through Digital Platforms in the Construction and Crafts Sector 10. Digital Technologies and the Generative Mechanisms Driving Value Creation in the Sharing Economy 11. Navigating Platform-Mediated Labor: A Mixed-Method Exploration of Worker Identity, Autonomy, and Governance 12. From Monopoly Money to Regular Money: Converting affective value into Monetary Value through Player-Driven Economies on Gaming Platforms Part IV: Social Value Creation and Entrepreneurship 13. Social Platform Value: Processes of Social Value Creation through Human Encounters 14. Digital Platforms, Artisan Female Migrant Entrepreneurs, and Social Value Creation: An Exploration in the Finnish Context 15. Revolutionizing Retail: The Impact of Live Streaming Commerce on Business Growth and Consumer Engagement
About the Author :
Victoria Slettli is Associate Professor at Inland School of Business and Social Sciences at the University of Inland Norway.
Sabine Baumann is Professor for Digital Business at Berlin School of Economics and Law and Scientific Director at OFFIS Institute for Information Technology.
Review :
"This is a groundbreaking book that links previously understudied areas of research including digital platforms with business ecosystems. This book is amongst the first to highlight how the role of networks and other collaborative relationships has a positive effect on value creation. I highly recommend it."
- Vanessa Ratten, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.
"Platforms and apps are everywhere, but understanding how they create value remains elusive. In their cunning introductory handbook, Victoria Slettli and Sabine Baumann gathered the insights of experts and their own to reshape our views on value creation in digital business ecosystems. There is definitely a “before” and an “after” to the reading of that handbook!"
- Myriam Ertz, Ph.D, CDMP, PCM, Full Professor in Marketing, Canada Research Chair in Technology, Sustainability and Society, Director of LaboNFC and Department of Economics and Administrative Sciences, University of Quebec at Chicoutimi.
