Add-on Solution Success: A Configurational View on Knowledge Sharing in Digital Platforms

Digital platforms serve as a foundation upon which manifold firms develop complementary add-ons to address heterogeneous customer needs. In order to successfully stimulate partner contributions platform vendors need to share knowledge with partners that enables them to develop add-ons. Vendors face a trade-off between addressing idiosyncratic needs of partners while ensuring the scalability of knowledge sharing. Literature indicates that standardized or idiosyncratic knowledge sharing does not per se result in successful outcomes, but rather depends on how knowledge sharing addresses characteristics of the platform’s architecture. In order to increase our understanding of this trade-off we derive a typology of platform architecture and knowledge sharing. We conduct an empirical study at a large enterprise platform vendor to uncover configurations of knowledge sharing approaches. We distill successful knowledge sharing approaches following a set-theoretic approach. Our research in progress offers insights into our preliminary results and gives an outlook on our future research.