Implementation of Platform Governance Mechanisms: Insights From a B2B Platform Ecosystem

Platform ecosystems are complex ecologies of firms with individual, sometimes conflicting, interests and goals. A platform owner as orchestrator of the ecosystem needs to constantly align the ecosystem actors’ individual interests towards common objectives. To achieve such alignment of interests, platform owners rely on a purposefully defined governance structure, which is implemented through a set of governance mechanisms. Despite a variety of mechanisms being discussed in the existing research, little is known about platform owners’ main activities to implement such mechanisms in their specific platform contexts, particularly in a B2B platform ecosystem context. To bridge this gap, we conduct an in-depth study of Salesforce, a thriving B2B platform ecosystem in the enterprise software industry. We find that the platform owner made significant resource investments to implement governance mechanisms based on innovative activities and we provide detailed empirical accounts on each of the main activities. Our findings indicate that governance mechanisms are implemented differently in B2B platform ecosystems compared to consumer-focused platform ecosystems, which should be examined in more detail by future research.