Multihoming within Platform Ecosystems: The Strategic Role of Human Capital

Platform ecosystems characterized by a few platform owners and numerous other complementor firms that partner with them have become quite common across industries. Even though there has been considerable research on platform ecosystems, attention has mostly been on the platform owners and their strategies. In this paper, we focus on the complementor firms and try to understand why the incidence of multi-homing, a strategy in which a complementor firm chooses to join multiple platforms rather than one, is often quite low. We build a capability framework based on human capital and test it on micro-level data from the ERP platform ecosystem. The study has implications for our understanding of platform growth and innovation and contributes toward the literature on platform ecosystems as well as strategic human capital.

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