UNDERSTANDING PLATFORM BUSINESS, PLATFORM ADOPTION AND PLATFORM COMPETITION WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF BIG DATA: CASE STUDIES IN CHINA

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the rapid emergence and expansion of platform organizations. It is witnessed that many industrial leading enterprises have taken great efforts to transform and upgrading into platform organizations, and to adopt platform business strategy to consolidate the leading place in the market. For instance, amongst the top 15 ‘billion-dollar’ enterprises, 11 of them are platform providers, including Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, etc. In recent years’ China, with well-adopted platform business strategies, many traditional industry leading enterprises have achieved better performance in the market, e.g. SAIC hatched internet-based car-sharing platform, PingAn hatched many internet-based fin-tech platforms including Lufax, Health Cloud and Bill Pass. However, apart from industrial leading enterprises, it is also find that many new entrants and some less competitive market participators also gradually catch up with the frontiers by adopting appropriate platform strategies, especially with big data techs. In academic field, platform business research also became an attractive research field when exploring innovative business models or strategies. The phenomena of platform business blooming have attracted massive interests from management research scholars (Evans and Schmalensee, 2008, Boudreau, 2010, Eisenmann et al., 2011, Gawer and Cusumano, 2014). Nevertheless, existing studies on platform business are most likely to focus on industrial leading enterprises and to analyse platforms in static manner, such as interpreting how a succeed platform operates and how platform strategy contributes to the enterprise’s development. Nevertheless, as more and more enterprises are willing to transform and upgrading into platform enterprise, thus more dynamic studies are required to understand how a platform enterprise or a platform strategy is actually constructed, and how a platform business is successfully diffused in practice. In addition, how to construct competitive advantages for the platform that diffused in platform competition also needs further studies. At last, compared with most existing studies, the understanding of platform construction, adoption and competition should be extended in the big data context in where the current businesses lived in. Therefore, by adopting two in-depth case studies from China, a conceptual framework is developed to bridge the research divides. Both documentary research and semi-structured interviews were conducted. Through qualitative case study, both theoretical contribution and practical implications are given in this thesis.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Ping Gao (Supervisor)