Capabilities for Digital Platform Survival: Insights from a Business-to-Business Digital Platform

A digital platform is viewed as the central point of gravity within its business ecosystem to facilitate value co-creation processes among its business ecosystem’s constituent actors. Considering the specificities of business ecosystems, we investigate digital platforms’ sustained growth—referred to as digital platform permanence in this study. We posit that digital platform permanence is contingent on its owner’s capabilities to ensure efficient and effective value co-creation processes among the digital platform’s constituent actors on both service system and service ecosystem levels. Building on the inherent control-generativity dualism of digital platforms and through investigating an existing business-to-business digital platform, we identify four key capabilities for digital platform permanence. While two capabilities (system orchestration and system reformation) reflect the owner’s ability to facilitate value co-creation processes on the service system level, the other two capabilities (ecosystem preservation and ecosystem diversification) reflect the owner’s ability to facilitate value co-creation processes on the service ecosystem level.