Design and governance of platform ecosystems - Key concepts and issues for future research

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of current research in IS on the design and governance of platform ecosystems. To this end, we conduct a literature review of relevant journals and conferences. We show that platform ecosystems have been analysed from two different perspectives: technology- and market-oriented. Thereby, most studies take on the viewpoint of the platform owner. Furthermore, we summarize key concepts on the design and governance of platform ecosystems that have been discussed in literature. As most relevant concepts we identify the definition of roles, pricing, boundary resources and openness. Based on this analysis, we derive issues for future research: the integration of market- and technology-oriented perspectives, an individual level of analysis to include complementors and end-users and the role of data as boundary resource in platform ecosystems. This paper contributes to the understanding of platform ecosystems in IS literature by structuring existing research with regard to different perspectives and concepts and by providing starting points for future work. In addition, it lays out which concepts practitioners need to consider when designing and governing platform ecosystems.