Call for Papers for a Special Issue

Strategies for Platform Ecosystems

Submission Deadline: February 28, 2018

Guest Editors

Tobias Kretschmer (LMU Munich)

Aija Leiponen (Cornell University and ETLA the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy)

Melissa Schilling (New York University)

Gurneeta Vasudeva (University of Minnesota)

SMJ Advising Editor

Sendil Ethiraj

Platform-based ecosystems are a vital source of dynamism and innovation for many technologies, products, and services in the global economy. A defining feature of platform ecosystems is the interdependency between a stable core or 'platform' that interfaces with a dynamic and heterogeneous set of complementary components to generate a stream of derivative products. Platforms spur innovation and efficiency in diverse sectors such as computers, video games, mobile phones, automobiles, payment systems, and e-commerce. However, platforms require coordination and integration across organizational units and firms that often have conflicting interests and requirements. As such, platforms raise interesting and complex issues that strategic management scholars are uniquely equipped to address. At the same time, platforms offer new kinds of contexts for strategy scholars to re-examine existing theories of organization, cooperation, competition, and decision making.

Platform owners must consider their own capabilities, technologies and processes as well as those of their suppliers, rivals and complementors to design for modularity and interoperability. Meanwhile, the strategies of platform participants influence how they contribute value to the platform ecosystem and how much of that value they will be able to appropriate. Consequently, managers must understand the nature of competition and collaboration in platform-based ecosystems. Such strategic decision-making goes beyond issues such as critical mass, switching costs, compatibility, and network effects, and encompasses a broader set of social, cognitive, and technical considerations that affect innovation outcomes and the division of labor, control rights, and firm profits.

Aims and Scope

This special issue aims to bring the study of platform ecosystems into mainstream strategy research and foster a distinctive body of scholarship. The special issue provides a forum for state-of-the-art research on platforms, standards and innovation spanning different industry, country, and institutional settings. We encourage papers that deepen our understanding of platform strategies by drawing on multiple theoretical backgrounds and methods and by leveraging novel data sources. Below we provide an illustrative set of research themes and questions.

Strategies for building platforms: When do firms develop internal platforms and when do they open up platforms to external providers? Which platforms should firms join? How does platform architecture evolve under proprietary versus open interfaces? Which players have the most architectural control? How does the design and development of platforms vary across industrial, national and institutional settings? How do firms convince consumers to adopt platforms and associated products and services?

Strategies for competing on platforms: How do firms maintain control over the core and peripheral components in the system? Is control necessary to capture value from the platform? How does the shift from between-firm competition to within- or between-platform competition alter the determinants of success and failure?

Strategies for managing platform relationships: What strategies can owners of a core technology employ to shape the development of complementary products by others? What can we learn about platform relationships using network analysis? How do firms balance cooperation and competition and reconcile private and collective benefits? How do platform participants manage relationships with external stakeholders? How do firms address social welfare concerns in light of network effects or technological lock-in and lock-out?

Strategies to cope with uncertainty and change: How do firms cope with the transition to new platform generations? How do cognitive constraints and managerial biases related to the uncertainty of platform evolution affect strategic decision-making? What strategies can firms use to achieve radical innovation that disrupts technological lock-in/lock-out in platform-based ecosystems? How do firms cope with platform evolution as firms enter and leave platforms?

Submission Process

Submitted papers must be in accordance with the requirements of the Strategic Management Journal. Original manuscripts are due by the Submission Deadline of February 28, 2018, and must be submitted using the SMJ Submission system at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/smj. Authors should indicate that they would like the submission to be considered for the special issue "Strategies for Platform Ecosystems". Authors of papers invited to be revised and resubmitted will have the opportunity to present their papers at a conference (the date and venue to be announced later), and will be expected to work within a tight timeframe for revisions.

Further Information

Questions concerning pertaining to this special issue may be directed to:

·       Tobias Kretschmer (t.kretschmer@lmu.de)

·       Aija Leiponen (aija.leiponen@cornell.edu)

·       Melissa Schilling (mschilli@stern.nyu.edu)

·       Gurneeta Vasudeva (gurneeta@umn.edu)

For questions about submitting to the special issue contact the SMJ Managing Editor, Sara DiBari (smjeditorial@wiley.com) or visit http://smj.strategicmanagement.net/.

Sub-theme 33: Heuristics: Novel Insights into Organizing and Organizations

Convenors:

 

Wolfgang H. Güttel

Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

wolfgang.guettel@jku.at

 

Moritz Loock

University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

moritz.loock@unisg.ch

 

Madeleine Rauch

European University Viadrina, Germany

rauch@europa-uni.de

 

Deadline: 

January, 8 2018: For further information please visit: https://www.egosnet.org/jart/prj3/egos/main.jart?rel=de&reserve-mode=active&content-id=1499635422149&subtheme_id=1474852913753

Additional Important information: 

• We would like to announce the forthcoming Special Issue on Heuristics and Simple Rules at Technological Forecasting and Social Chance edited by the Convenors of this track. CfP will be available in early 2018!
• Kathleen Eisenhardt (Stanford) will be an active participant and keynote speaker in this sub-theme.
  
  

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Call for Papers

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One surprise in and around organizations is that individuals, teams and organizations often process only little information yet human organization is relatively effective. This surprise is fundamental to the scientific community: early reference has been made throughout the work of Herbert Simon on decision-making as well as by other widely recognized Nobel price laureates (Daniel Kahneman in his work on human judgement and decision-making under uncertainty, and Vernon Smith´s work on alternative market mechanisms). As such, heuristics have taken on a central role in research on strategy, organization and innovation (e.g. Bingham & Eisenhardt, 2011; see also for an overview Loock & Hinnen, 2015).
 
Within this, heuristics, as a micro-model of individual cognition and the organization-specific processes of sharing heuristics across individuals and levels, have been explored. Heuristics specify how individuals search, stop searching and how they decide to act. Often such specification is linked to features of the organization (e.g. formal processes, social norms, learning). Thus, heuristics may be linked to cognition in and around organization (Eggers & Kaplan, 2013), organizational dynamics such as for instance cross-understanding (Huber & Lewis, 2010), or the simple rules that organizations utilize (Sull & Eisenhardt, 2015). While interesting contributions have been made on the individual-level and heuristics are foundations of adaptive individual behavior (Gigerenzer et al., 2011), we are especially interested in work on heuristics that link to the specific surprises in and around organization and management. In the managerial domain, a wide array of research looks at heuristics, such as in regard to simplification (Schwenk, 1988), biases in managerial behavior (e.g. Amit & Schoemaker, 1993), as an important element of adaptive managerial behavior (Bingham & Eisenhardt, 2011; Helfat & Peteraf, 2015) or business modeling (Loock & Hacklin, 2015). We are interested in work that builds on these ideas and further links it to organization studies.
 
There is now a wide-spread recognition that heuristics have a profound influence on strategy, organization and innovation. Some examples are:

• Heuristics can effectively negotiate among diverse requirements. For instance, they can respond to different interests or friction forces that need to be accommodated in organizational decisions (Schoemaker, 1990), and they can be well understood and shared even in diverse social settings. Heuristics can also balance efficiency and flexibility in dynamic environments (Eisenhardt et al., 2010).
• Heuristics can offer a strategic rationale and develop iteratively from the particular context in which they emerge and are embedded. Research, for instance, has started to illuminate the learning of heuristics (Bingham & Eisenhardt, 2011; Bingham & Haleblian, 2012), or how well heuristics perform in comparison with non-heuristic models of cognition (e.g. Wuebben & Wangenheim, 2008).
• Given the complexity and dynamic nature of organizational environments, heuristics seem to be especially beneficial for intractable organizational decision problems (Bettis, 2016).

Research opportunities and unanswered questions: Given the proliferation of interest in understanding the nature and impact of heuristics across and beyond management disciplines, this sub-theme seeks to push forward the literature along questions such as:

• How do heuristics shape cognition and behavior at different levels such as individual, group, organization and inter-organizationally? An important difference to heuristics at the individual level is that heuristics in organizations are shared by many individuals. Heuristics are also shared across many organizational levels. How does this organizational sharing of heuristics work? What are the specifics of sharing across different organizational levels? How do heuristics interact or 'aggregate' across different levels? Different units in an organization or different stakeholders might operate different heuristics. How does the integration, interaction or aggregation work in such scenarios?
• How do heuristics develop and evolve over time? How and why do some heuristics co-emerge or fit to each other and others not? Heuristics are not static but develop and evolve over time. This dynamic aspect to heuristics is relatively little explored. How to processes of heuristic development and evolution look like and unfold? What kind of changes in heuristics can be observed over time? To what extent do heuristics change over time or are relatively stable?
• How do heuristics interplay with their environment? It is of interest to further develop our understanding of the distinct mechanisms by which the environment shapes heuristics (and vice-versa). It is of interest to consider novel combinations of many mechanisms, but also to provide novel insights into the distinct role the single or simple combinations of such mechanisms play in shaping the development of heuristics. – We invite and encourage contributions on a theoretical-conceptual and an empirical basis that try to uncover strategic decision making by using heuristics in general and/or open the black box associated with them. We further encourage contributions on the interactions to other topics and discussions such as routines, aspiration levels, cognition, dynamic capabilities, learning, ambidexterity, and related concepts and fields. All kinds of empirical settings, e.g. longitudinal studies, process studies, secondary data analyses, case studies, surveys, experiments, actor-centered measurements etc. are more than appreciated. We also encourage a multi-level analysis of the topic at hand and encourage novel methods to study heuristics. We want to provide a home and create a platform for scholars who engage in this core field of organization research.
• How are organizational heuristics linked to neighboring fields, such as alternative dynamics and processes of managerial and organizational cognition, simple rules, routines or artificial intelligence? What kind of problems in management and organizations lead to the emergence and evolution of heuristics? How are heuristics in management and organization different to heuristics in other domains? How can a distinct organizational view on heuristics, and how can specific studies of exemplar organizational heuristics advance our broader understanding of organizations on the one hand, and heuristics and cognition in the social, organizational world on the other hand?

References

Amit, R., & Schoemaker, P.J.H. (1993): "Strategic assets and organizational rent." Strategic Management Journal, 14 (1), 33–46.

Bettis, R. (2016): "Organizationally intractable decision problems and the intellectual virtues of heuristics." Journal of Management, forthcoming.

Bingham, C.B., & Eisenhardt, K.M. (2011): "Rational heuristics: the 'simple rules' that strategists learn from process experience." Strategic Management Journal, 32 (13), 1437–1464.

Bingham, C.B., & Haleblian, J.J. (2012): "How firms learn heuristics: Uncovering missing components of organizational learning." Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 6 (2), 152–177.

Eggers, J.P., & Kaplan, S. (2013): "Cognition and Capabilities: A Multi-Level Perspective." The Academy of Management Annals, 7 (1), 295–340.

Eisenhardt, K.M., Furr, N.R., & Bingham, C.B. (2010): "Microfoundations of Performance: Balancing Efficiency and Flexibility in Dynamic Environments." Organization Science, 21 (6), 1263–1273.

Gigerenzer, G., Hertwig, R., & Pachur, T. (2011): Heuristics: The Foundations of Adaptive Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.

Helfat, C.E., & Peteraf, M.A. (2015): "Managerial cognitive capabilities and the microfoundations of dynamic capabilities." Strategic Management Journal, 36, 831–850.

Huber, G.P., & Lewis, K. (2010): "Cross-understanding: Implications for group cognition and performance." Academy of Management Review, 35 (1), 6–26.

Loock, M., & Hacklin, F. (2015): "Business Modeling as Configuring Heuristics." Advances in Strategic Management, 33, 187–205.

Loock, M., & Hinnen, G. (2015): "Heuristics in organizations: A review and a research agenda." Journal of Business Research, 68 (9), 2027–2036.

Schoemaker, P.J. (1990): "Strategy, complexity, and economic rent." Management science, 36 (10), 1178–1192.

Schwenk, C.R. (1988): "The cognitive perspective on strategic decision making." Journal of Management Studies, 25 (1), 41–55.

Sull, D., & Eisenhardt, K.M. (2015): Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Wuebben, M., & Wangenheim, F. (2008): "Instant customer base analysis: Managerial heuristics often 'get it right'." Journal of Marketing, 72 (3), 82–93.