Looking Under the Hood: Understanding the Trade-Offs in Leveraging Platform Architectures

Platforms have become central to the development of new products and services in many industries, creating new opportunities for value creation. Platforms actively foster the development of new products and services by enabling third-party developers to reuse and extend the platform architecture by exposing the architecture's core components using standardized interfaces (i.e., Application Programming Interfaces, APIs). There are some well known benefits to leveraging platform architectures, namely for its abillity to facilitate recombination, evolvability and standardization. However, these benefits are associated with trade-offs, specifically: (1) APIs enable recombination of platform components but also introduce architectural constraints that can limit future flexibility; (2) platform architectures evolve to enable new innovation opportunities yet require stability to reduce uncertainty for developers; and (3) standardization in platform architectures promotes efficiency and scalability, though some level of complexity is required to meet diverse needs. This dissertation addresses the implications of these overlooked trade-offs in leveraging platform architectures through three independent empirical studies. By focusing on the platform architecture itself, this dissertation demonstrates that platform architectures indeed offer significant benefits for innovation and value creation but leveraging these architectures requires the careful navigation of inherent trade-offs. The findings provide valuable insights for theory and practice in information systems, management, and digital innovation.