Strategies for Complementor Participation: Contrasting Open Innovation and Resource-based View

This paper analyses strategies for platform owners to increase complementor partici-pation on the platform. Specifically, it draws on open innovation (OI) and the re-source-based view (RBV) to isolate three drivers of complementor participation, namely breadth of content offerings and boundary resources (related to OI), and ex-clusive content (associated with RBV). We hypothesize that higher levels of each of these drivers increase the platform’s attractiveness to future complementors and in-crease complementor participation. Based on negative binomial fixed effects regres-sions in the context of video game consoles, we find that boundary resources and exclu-sive content, but not breadth of content offerings, are positively related to comple-mentor participation. This shows that drivers from both OI and RBV relate to comple-mentor participation. The results have implications for the orchestration of platform ecosystems.