Digital Platforms: Balancing Control and Generativity

Digital platforms—extensible codebases serving as building block upon which third-party actors can add complementary resources—afford contemporary organizations to mutually integrate resources in networked business ecosystems. Considering business ecosystems’ specificities, digital platforms require a delicate balance of two conflicting ends. While the platform owner’s control aims for stabilization to exploit the given ecosystem of third-party actors (control), third-party actors’ autonomy aims for dynamism to explore novel ave-nues of resource integration (generativity). Extant literature opts for either pure control or pure generativity. However, pure control makes adaptation difficult, and pure generativity suffers the costs of experimentation without gaining associated benefits. Conversely, considering the complementary benefits of simultaneous control and generativity, we suggest balancing these activities—anything but trivial, given inherent trade-offs and contradictions. Relying on an organizational ambidexterity perspective in reviewing digital plat-form literature, we extract a set of four modes of balancing control and generativity in dig-ital platforms—contextual, structural, temporal, and domainal balance. These modes serve as theoretical foundation for subsequent steps of an overall empirical study.