Understanding the Interplay between Boundary Resources and Governance Practices in Influencing Ecosystem Value Co-creation for Digital Platforms: A Case From the Global South

TL;DR

This study explores how boundary resources and governance practices in digital platforms, specifically mobile money in the global South, influence ecosystem value co-creation, highlighting the importance of governance in enabling platform generativity.

Contribution

It applies a boundary resources model and platform governance framework to analyze ecosystem co-creation in a mobile money platform in the global South, revealing governance challenges.

Findings

Boundary resources facilitate value co-creation

Governance practices can hinder complementor engagement

Effective governance requires transparency and visibility

Abstract

Despite their potentially transformative impact, few studies have investigated how commercially-driven digital platforms such as mobile money facilitate ecosystem value co-creation in the global South. Consequently, using a boundary resources model and platform governance approaches, this paper aims to examine how a payment platform facilitates ecosystem value co-creation with third party actors. An in-depth qualitative inquiry was adopted for the study using an embedded single-case design. The results show that although ecosystem value co-creation was enabled by the introduction of boundary resources tools, some platform governance practices hindered some complementors from harnessing the affordances of the platforms. These constraints include lack of visibility of the boundary resources and transparency challenges in the acceptance criteria. We thus argue that platform generativity on its own is not sufficient to support ecosystem value co-creation, but requires appropriate platform governance to deal with behavioural complexity of ecosystem actors by using optimal control mechanisms.