Fostering Establishment of BtoB Platform Ecosystem: Ingot Information-sharing Platform Case Study

In recent years, establishing a platform ecosystem has become important for companies to gain a competitive advantage, but doing so is quite difficult for many companies. Previous studies have mainly focused on the business-to-consumer (BtoC) platform ecosystem, and limited attention has been given to the complex industrial business-to-business (BtoB) platform ecosystem, which involves industrial users instead of consumers. Although some studies have addressed the issues faced by platform leaders and complementors in the establishment phase of platform ecosystems, few have examined issues from the perspective of industrial platform users who cocreate value through the platform. This study explores the mechanism of user participation in industrial BtoB platform establishment based on a single case study and then proposes a model for building an industrial BtoB platform ecosystem. This model shows that service values are created in three stages (early, middle, and late) of the successful establishment phase, which is the theoretical and practical contribution of this study to platform ecosystem research.