Complementor satisfaction with boundary resources in iiot ecosystems

Abstract

Fostering partnerships and generativity, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platforms change the way of value creation, enabling platform-based ecosystems. Platform Boundary Resources (BR) provide a recognized concept to foster third-party innovation, enabling various hardware- and software-developing companies to use the functionalities of the platform. Despite the high importance of BR to open the platform and foster the innovation, their design and quality aspects, as well as their influence on the satisfaction of complementors, remain under-researched. To understand how complementors value different BR in IIoT ecosystems, we conducted a complementor satisfaction survey, addressing developers in an IIoT ecosystem, who utilize various BR. The study is based on the case of the IIoT platform MindSphere, developed by Siemens. Our findings include the calculation of the weighted complementor satisfaction with BR. Adding the complementor satisfaction perspective to BR research, our study shows how to apply a structured quality improvement to the BR concept and supports platform providers, highlighting which BR should be in focus during the ecosystem development through the quality improvement of prioritized BR.