Platform owners and complementors: the emergence and evolution of platform firms and the performance implications for organizational learning, strategic alliance, and vertical integration behaviors of platform participants

In recent years, platform firms have become an essential component of the business world. With the increasing number of studies, the impacts of platform firms on the traditional business environment are visible in many industry settings. Yet, little attention has been paid to the origin of these organizations. Analyzing 52 publicly available interviews with platform entrepreneurs, managers, and venture capitalists, I explore the emergence of platform firms. In a rigorous grounded theory-building study, I develop a theory and a process model showing how platform firms come into existence over four consecutive stages: (1) Inefficient Markets and Incumbents, (2) Entrepreneurial Motivation and Enabling Factors, (3) Efficiency-Enhancing Means, and (4) Platform Firms. The model illustrates that platform organizations’ impact on the traditional business environment results from developing efficiency-enhancing means. It also highlights the differences between platform firms and traditional firms, and yields important implications for existing theories of the firm.