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Leverage Once, Earn Repeatedly—Capabilities for Creating and Appropriating Value in Cloud Platform Ecosystems

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Network, Smart and Open

Abstract

Information technology (IT) advancements enabled new delivery models (i.e. Cloud Computing), thereby facilitating the emergence of new business models in the IT industry, such as Cloud platform ecosystems. With their growing acceptance and diffusion in practice, we need a deeper understanding of their IT capabilities in order to implement their business model, thereby creating and appropriating value. We draw on empirical data from four case studies of Cloud platform ecosystems utilizing a framework on IT-enabled business models for data analysis. We found four key motivations for interfirm collaboration that each generated business model requirements specified in the context of Cloud platform ecosystems. These drive the development of unique B2B IT capabilities enabling value creation and appropriation mechanisms. We propose three dyadic (relation-specific) IT customization and two network IT standardization (network-oriented) capabilities based on our cross case analysis. Furthermore, we describe prevalent value creation and appropriation mechanisms and suggest two additional mechanisms grounded in the data: downstream capabilities and platform resourcing. We provide a possible reasoning on the underlying logic of IT capabilities, value creation and appropriation of Cloud platform ecosystems.

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Correspondence to Christopher Hahn .

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Hahn, C., Huntgeburth, J., Zarnekow, R. (2018). Leverage Once, Earn Repeatedly—Capabilities for Creating and Appropriating Value in Cloud Platform Ecosystems. In: Lamboglia, R., Cardoni, A., Dameri, R., Mancini, D. (eds) Network, Smart and Open. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62636-9_10

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