Digital Platforms and Collaborative Ecosystems: Best Practices and Emerging Issues

The significant rise in relevance in “digital transformation” is drastically evolving the business environment and presenting a multitude of diverse organizational and sectoral challenges. Indeed, the emergence of a multifaced set of innovative and powerful digital technologies as well as the growing attention to sustainability issues are pushing companies to rethink their business models with broad organizational and policy implications (Yoo et al., 2010; Nambisan, 2017). The phenomenon of digitization is radically encouraging organizations to create new products, services, and disrupt their way of doing business that relies on multi-stakeholder and openness-based collaborations among individuals, organizations, ecosystems, and society (Adner, 2017; Russo et al., 2013; Nambisan et al., 2019a, 2019b). Despite the increasingly prominent role that collaborative platforms are playing in economies (Accenture, 2018), there is still a paucity of studies that analyze their business models, especially when these platforms leverage modern digital technol- ogies. To acquire knowledge on the business models of digital collaborative plat- forms, this work employs a multiple case study on two emergent collaborative platforms from the food sector, which are built around a B2B and a B2C model, respectively.