Knowledge Sharing in Digital Platform Ecosystems – A Textual Analysis of SAP’s Developer Community

Martin Kauschinger, Maximilian Schreieck, Markus Boehm, Helmut Krcmar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Research on digital platform ecosystems is growing rapidly. While the relevance of third-party applications is commonly known, scholars have made only minor attempts to analyze knowledge sharing between platform owners and third-party developers. We find that third-party application development is a knowledge intensive task that requires knowledge to cross organizational boundaries. In this paper, we use computational analytic methods to analyze knowledge sharing in a digital platform ecosystem. We collected trace data about a third-party developer ecosystem with frequent knowledge exchange between the platform owner and third-party developers. We developed a web scraper and retrieved all 4866 pages of SAP’s developer community that were tagged ‘SAP Cloud Platform’. Next, we used text mining to render a topic model. Based on the latent dirichlet allocation algorithm, we extracted 25 topics that were frequently discussed in the community. We clustered the topics into the following six meta-topics: User Accounts and Authentication, Connectivity, Cloud Database, Specific Technologies, SAP Resources, and Installation. Platform owners can use our approach to (1) identify frequently discussed topics, (2) generate meta-knowledge in these topics and (3) use the meta-knowledge to improve their platform core and its boundary resources.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInnovation Through Information Systems - Volume II
Subtitle of host publicationA Collection of Latest Research on Technology Issues
EditorsFrederik Ahlemann, Reinhard Schütte, Stefan Stieglitz
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages21-39
Number of pages19
ISBN (Print)9783030867966
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Event16th International Conference on Business Information Systems Engineering, WI 2021 -
Duration: 9 Mar 202111 Mar 2021

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation
Volume47
ISSN (Print)2195-4968
ISSN (Electronic)2195-4976

Conference

Conference16th International Conference on Business Information Systems Engineering, WI 2021
Period9/03/2111/03/21

Keywords

  • Application development
  • Enterprise software
  • Knowledge sharing
  • Platform ecosystem
  • Text mining

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