Marin Jovanovic

Platform ecosystem literature assumes that collective and actor-level value propositions co-evolve synchronously through market-driven coordination. Yet in ecosystems initiated by institutional mandates, the collective purpose may be prescribed through regulation before market actors can identify viable individual value propositions—a condition we term temporal decoupling. This paper investigates how platform providers navigate this tension in the European digital wallet ecosystem forming under the eIDAS2 regulation. Drawing on 18 interviews with 11 wallet providers and extensive documentary analysis, we develop a three-phase process model of value design under temporal decoupling, theorized as a distributed dynamic capabilities process. In the first phase, non-market actors perform an ecosystem-level sensing by prescribing a collective value proposition through regulation, generating temporal decoupling because seizing actor-level value propositions must be performed by market actors—a mechanism we term ecosystem catalysis. In the second phase, market actors engage in distributed seizing through a diverge-to-converge dynamic, experimenting with diverse value configurations within regulatory parameters. In the third phase, the ecosystem stabilizes through distributed reconfiguring into a pluralistic equilibrium, as providers crystallize three strategic configurations—externalizing, developing, and leveraging—representing distinct coupling modes between institutional and market logics. The study contributes to platform ecosystem theory by showing that, when sensing, seizing and reconfiguring are unbundled across institutional and market actors, value design produces strategic pluralism rather than convergence.

Corporate diversification theory is being reshaped by data and AI, yet evidence on how multi-business firms should organize AI across their portfolios remains scarce. We address a corporate-strategy question that is increasingly central in the digital era: should AI be implemented as a corporate-wide policy or tailored at the business-unit level, and does the answer depend on the nature of the product offering? Drawing on the theory of the firm and recent arguments about digital diversification, we theorize that the performance impact of AI implementation locus is contingent on whether business units manufacture smart products—offerings with embedded narrow AI that operate within interconnected value ecosystems. Using a unique dataset of 667 manufacturing product lines from Spanish firms, we show that across the full sample neither implementation locus dominates unconditionally. However, the interaction with smart products reveals a clear pattern: for non-smart product lines, corporate-wide AI implementation is associated with superior market performance, consistent with internal economies of scope; for smart product lines, business-unit AI implementation yields superior performance, consistent with ecosystem-facing specialization and interoperability demands. The findings contribute to the emerging literature on digital diversification by showing that AI governance should be treated as a portfolio design problem, centralizing what truly scales while decentralizing what must remain close to product architectures, customers, and ecosystem interfaces.

This study investigates the structuring of private sustainability governance as a critical mechanism for facilitating sustainability transitions. Drawing on 33 semi-structured interviews with manufacturing firms, regulatory bodies, policy associations, auditing firms, and management consultancies, the study examines how firms navigate increasing external governance pressures, including regulatory ambiguity, compliance demands, market expectations, and stakeholder accountability, while simultaneously managing internal governance through organizational restructuring, sustainable performance measurement, data management, human resources, and incentive structures. The findings highlight the importance of integrating rule-based and goal-based private sustainability governance through two key mechanisms: shaping external governance by aligning with and influencing regulatory standards, and adapting internal governance to embed sustainability into core business operations. This study develops a hybrid governance framework that demonstrates how firms leverage both mechanisms in parallel, revealing the tensions inherent in balancing regulatory compliance with strategic sustainability ambitions. We make a further contribution by underscoring the role of ethical change management in fostering transparency, accountability, and proactive sustainability commitments. By examining governance structures in combination with ethical considerations, the study advances the discourse on private sustainability governance, offering both theoretical insights and practical implications for firms navigating the transition toward sustainable systems.

This chapter develops a typology of B2B platform business models. B2B platforms can be divided into three types depending on the nature of the platform market structures they enable. (1) The product-service platformizer business model creates a platform-like interface on top of a product or service and helps bring in externally-provided production-side complements to join the focal firm’s value proposition. (2) The platform ecosystem orchestrator opens a multi-sided market on top of a B2B product-service value proposition and enables customers to select complements from an ecosystem. (3) The platform market guardian creates an open or semi-open platform marketplace for other B2B firms to transact products or services. For each type, we discuss and illustrate the B2B firm’s value creation and capture logic, platform governance, and platform architecture characteristics.

Building on an in-depth study of a manufacturing company’s shift from a product to a product-service business model, we explore how single-focus companies transition to a dual orientation. Although companies generally use highly sophisticated practices to manage a dual orientation, those that transition to one successfully start with less sophisticated practices. Early on, the use of simple tradeoff practices, which maintain the product and service logics, helps single-focus companies explore the emergent tensions that their transition to a dual orientation causes. Conversely, adopting more sophisticated practices at this early stage overwhelms them. At a later stage, these companies’ growing understanding of the tensions allows them to experiment with more comprehensive paradox practices that transcend the product and service logics. Conversely, maintaining simple practices at this stage prevents them from gaining the solution experience required to complete the transition. The evolutionary process culminates in sophisticated routinized practices that institutionalize recurrent tensions’ solution, while allowing for further experimentation to deal with new tensions. The different practices’ appropriate sequence and pacing during the evolutionary process facilitate companies’ transition to a dual orientation.

This study investigates how global manufacturers offer advanced services, such as outcome‐based contracts, to global customers. Offering advanced services requires companies to engage in and manage win–win collaborations with a diverse set of service network partners. However, there is currently a lack of insights into the value co‐creation challenges faced by manufacturers’ R&D units and their service network partners. Equally, there is a pressing need for roles to be properly aligned when offering advanced services in global markets. Based on 34 exploratory interviews with respondents from two manufacturers and their six globally dispersed front‐end service network partners, this study identifies diverse co‐creation challenges related to the provision of advanced services in global markets. The results show that complex collaborations of this nature often do not lead to win–win relationships but rather to less understood win–lose or lose–win scenarios. Our proposed framework unpacks how to manage value co‐creation challenges and establish win–win relationships through role alignment. This study’s findings show that the successful provision of advanced services requires manufacturers to play the role of global service orchestrators and service network partners to act as global service integrators. Thus, role alignment provides greater latitude to establish a joint sphere of value co‐creation for back‐end and front‐end actors. We conclude by discussing this paper’s theoretical and practical contributions to the emerging literature on servitization in global markets and global service networks.