One of the main building blocks in platforms are different actors taking part in them. The significance of partners emerged in few ways within these cases. On one hand, in digital platforms, partners are critical in creating value. On the other hand, from resource perspective, partners offer knowledge, which the platform owner may lack. Next, I will present the findings related to building a partner network both from development and value perspective.
Partners in value creation
Digital platforms, in most of the cases, enable through technological advancements third parties to join the ecosystem. The value is created in orchestration with all the actors taking part of the platform, including owner, customers, partners and other parties. These two cases present two different type of platforms, one is innovation platform and the other one is transaction platform.
The innovation platform creates value by offering complementary products and services, which
allows solving customer problems on a larger scale. One interviewee focusing on the partner side of the platform states:
“We can basically use the network, enabled by the platform, and we solve the problems by combining different kind of solutions.”
”By combining these components, we now get more value compared to what any single product or service could bring.”
In the platform thinking, the focus has shifted from producing single products or services to providing large scale solutions to wider business problems. Additionally, it is brought up that, complementary products and services not only bring value to customers, but other partners can benefit of them. An interviewee focusing on innovation platform describes:
”Now, our customers, or those partners, can directly utilize the functionalities.”
Partners in resources
Although, platform thinking revolves around partners in the ecosystem creating value together, according to these case interviews, partner network is also vital from the internal resource perspective. Based on the interview data, both of the case companies have leaned on external partners at some point. Giving birth to a platform is neither of the case companies’ core business and the need emerged at a certain point. This has created need to apply new resources and re-think the internal processes. An interviewee, who has been focusing on partnerships describe:
“We established that Partnership Development function.”
“We understood that, we cannot do everything by ourselves, instead we are more agile, and we learn faster if we partner up.”
The partner network has had an integral part in the development process. Although external resources are used in the process, the management and leadership come from the focal company. And once again, all of the pieces together and combined build up the platform and
they might not be as valuable separately. An interviewee describes the joint operation with external partners:
“We have switched precisely to in-house development, switch to multi-vendor development, which means that we might have developers from various software companies, but the team in a sense is at our office.”
”The development work is led by a member of our company so we haven’t ordered from one vendor for example that hey make us an app, which maybe had been the previous way to do things or was the previous way.”
Incentives to join the platform
When focusing on complementing partners, they have several inducements to join the platforms of these case companies. The biggest themes around these interviews is the platform owner’s large existing customer base and a well-recognized brand. By joining the platform, partners gain a new marketing and sales channel. The interviewees describe the incentives:
“We have access to so many people and we can target easily, so it is appealing.”
”The visibility, our brand and new customer relationships, and of course then added value for them.”
“When the partner joins our network, it at least indirectly gives the partners an opportunity in some way to access our truly large customer base.”
In all of the interviews, it becomes relevant that platforms are not developed in a self-centered manner. The companies are willing to share their customers, and offer their partners business and value, and thus increase to overall value created to all of the actors in the platform. This view is developed as interviewees state:
”We want to offer our partners a marketing channel.”
“It makes the partner’s solution even more functional when they use our platform.”
The positive experiences can further help the platform owner to sell the idea of joining in the platform for other partners. On the other hand, the platform owner should be willing to offer actual value for partners and open up, rather than trying to only benefit one-sided. Joining the platform has even opened up a new business areas and geographical areas for the partner. An interviewee focusing on innovation platform states:
”We have helped them to expand their domain, so basically we have brought the partners’
services inside the buildings.”
”When they get into our ecosystem and get access to our marketing mechanism, they start to receive enquiries from other countries as well.”
The partner network proposes several answers to RQ3: How does a successful integration enhance the firm’s competitiveness through building of new value creation opportunities? First, partners and their solutions integrated to platform owner’s solutions enable the focal company to solve customers’ problems on a wider perspective. This way company can create more value and even outrun the competition. By offering complementary products and services provided by partners, the company can provide all-in-one-solutions, which is an easy option for customer. Secondly, partners enable more efficient operations both on platform owner and customer side. By partnering up, the platform owner is able to act in a more agile manner and the platform itself can create efficiency in operations compared to previous model. On the other hand, the customer does not have to join in multiple platforms or themselves try to find solutions, which benefit them. Instead, the platform offers them the additional services, which means less search costs for the customer. Lastly, the partner network creates lock-in for the platform and utilizes externalities due to large existing customer base. All of these enhance the competitiveness of the platform owner either directly or indirectly.
6 CONCLUSIONS
In this final chapter, I will conclude this thesis. First, in discussion, I will relate my findings to the previous research presented in the literature review. I will also present the theoretical contribution, that this thesis offers to the academia. Secondly, I will present managerial implications and describe my contribution to practitioners, mainly representatives of traditional companies, who are dealing with integration of platform business into their existing operations.
And finally, I acknowledge limitations of this thesis to be considered as well as present potential for future research.