Evolution mechanisms for digital platforms: a review and analysis across platform types

Digital platforms have emerged as a major organizational form in various industries including hospitality (e.g., Airbnb), innovation (e.g., Designhill), and software development (e.g., Apple iOS). Some platforms evolve successfully to build stable and growing ecosystems, while many fail to do so. The high rate of failure amongst platforms can be linked to platforms emulating mechanisms from successful platforms that are less applicable to their context. Therefore, understanding the evolution of platforms requires attention to variations in their evolution mechanisms across platform types. In this paper, we analyze the mechanisms of platform evolution across multiple platform types by reviewing the growing literature on digital platforms within major Information Systems (IS) journals, IS conferences and management journals. We identify three categories of evolution mechanisms, namely platform design, platform operations and capabilities, and platform ecosystem and governance. Our analysis points to variation in the applicability of each category across different types of platforms.