Here today, here tomorrow: Considering options theory in digital platform development

Abstract

Past decades have seen business platforms proliferate not only as a means to collaborate, but also decrease time-to-market and promote innovation. However, extant literature tends to dichotomise platforms, perceiving them as either strategic resources or technical systems. Applied to digital platforms, we argue that options theory offers a potential means to reconcile the operand and operant perspectives of platform artefacts. We illustrate our point via a case study of a firm that has gradually developed a product that enables mobile communication into a digital platform that provides a wide range of customers with services from several different suppliers. This study contributes to our understanding of digital platforms as it describes how design choices by a provider can affect flexibility and continued development of new services.