Digital at the edge – antecedents and performance effects of boundary resource deployment

•Boundary resources can provide openness in the form of access and resource openness.•Digital knowledge and digital complementors drive boundary resource deployments.•Use of boundary resources per se does not lead to positive performance implications.•Firms with high market power profit from boundar...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The journal of strategic information systems Vol. 31; no. 1; p. 101708
Main Authors: Zapadka, Patryk, Hanelt, André, Firk, Sebastian
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Kidlington Elsevier B.V 01.03.2022
Elsevier Science SA
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ISSN:0963-8687, 1873-1198
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:•Boundary resources can provide openness in the form of access and resource openness.•Digital knowledge and digital complementors drive boundary resource deployments.•Use of boundary resources per se does not lead to positive performance implications.•Firms with high market power profit from boundary resource deployments.•Performance effects are primarily driven by boundary resources for access openness. With business ecosystems digitalizing by the force of digital innovation, the deployment of boundary resources (such as application programming interfaces: APIs) becomes a strategic option across contexts. We distinguish between boundary resources that provide access openness and those that provide resource openness, and theorize the antecedents and consequences of their deployment. Employing panel data regressions to a longitudinal cross-industry dataset, we find that the digital knowledge base of the focal firm and the existence of potential digital complementors drive boundary resource deployment. Such deployment benefits firm performance depending on the firm’s market power. From our empirical analysis, we reveal a differentiated perspective on the quality of the confined openness provided by boundary resources as well as the embeddedness of their deployment in the rationales and motivations of the associated actors in digital business ecosystems. We complement the existent theoretical framework on boundary resources and provide valuable insights to managers reflecting about deploying boundary resources in a beneficial way.
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ISSN:0963-8687
1873-1198
DOI:10.1016/j.jsis.2022.101708