Open Platform Boundary Resources as Arenas for Strategic Exploitation

Open platform boundary resources, those elements that enable contributions and participation, are strategically critical for platform ecosystem prosperity. However, at the same time, boundary resources make the platform vulnerable to exploitation. Surprisingly, there are no studies to date that have addressed exploitation of open platform boundary resources beyond the developer and hacker communities. In our inductive case study of Google Android and five platform forks, we expose the strategic design of boundary resources, how the platform forks exploit boundary resources using several micro-strategies – those of forking, hacking, cloning and substituting – in bundling their platform stack, and how Google has strategically responded to such exploitation. We contribute by developing a theoretical lens on open platform stack and its boundary resources that considers them as not only available for contribution but also open for exploitation. Our model provides important directions for developing a resource-...