Enhancing or Transcending the Pipeline? How Incumbents Transition Toward Marketplace Platforms

ABSTRACT Business‐to‐business incumbents whose value creation rests on pipeline business models increasingly launch their own marketplace platforms. Yet how these business model transitions toward marketplace platforms unfold, and what they imply for the pipeline model, remains poorly understood. Adopting a cognitive perspective on managerial interpretations and decisions, we conduct a comparative case study of five marketplace platforms launched by incumbents in the European industrial products industry. We find that platform competition and the opportunities managers perceive in business‐to‐consumer platforms trigger platform creation, after which incumbents follow one of two pathways. In pipeline‐enhancing transitions, managers locate future value in the existing pipeline model and adopt platform features that strengthen it, resulting in cognitive alignment and interconnected platform–pipeline business models. In pipeline‐transcending transitions, managers locate future value in the marketplace platform and use business‐to‐consumer marketplaces as a reference point. This generates cognitive tensions with the pipeline model that ultimately resolve into independent pipeline and marketplace platform business models. Which pathway unfolds depends on the customer segments served, which shape managers' reference points for interpreting the evolving platform business model. Our process model explains these divergent outcomes and contributes to innovation management research on business model transitions toward platforms and their cognitive dynamics.