Value Creation in Digital Platforms and Business Ecosystems

Digital platform organizations have become integral to everyday life, delivering services and products while reshaping entire industries. Yet platforms are only one manifestation of a broader phenomenon: digital business ecosystems. These ecosystems extend beyond single firms or platforms, encompassing networks of users, complementors, institutions, and infrastructures that together create, transform, and distribute value.

Value Creation in Digital Platforms and Business Ecosystems addresses the complexity of how both digital platforms and business ecosystems create and deliver value in the networks they construct, facilitate and control. Drawing on cutting-edge research from the international academic community, it provides an in-depth investigation of the mechanisms, dimensions, and challenges of value creation in digital contexts. This timely volume explores questions such as: How do digital platforms reconfigure traditional value chains? In what ways do ecosystems enable new forms of collaboration, entrepreneurial activity, and cultural participation? What tensions emerge when ecosystems foster innovation but also create dependencies, exclusion, or algorithmic bias? How do ecosystems affect labor markets, sustainability, and the blurring of boundaries between the physical and virtual?

It is an essential reference text for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in the theoretical aspects and practical applications of value creation in digital platforms and business ecosystems.

Victoria Slettli is Associate Professor at Inland School of Business and Social Sciences at the University of Inland Norway.

Sabine Baumann is Professor for Digital Business at Berlin School of Economics and Law and Scientific Director at OFFIS Institute for Information Technology.