关键词: 平台开放广度, 平台开放深度, 平台创新绩效, 平台吸引力, 层次回归分析, 软件平台

Abstract:

With the rapid development and wide application of information technology, more and more firms realize and enhance product value by means of software system. Software platform provides a common technical architecture for a large number of independent software, and becomes a multi-functional carrier, so that independent software can provide services for users rely on the software platform. Over the past decade, the software platform industry in China has boomed, both Internet companies and traditional manufacturing companies in transition have established their own open platforms to achieve innovation through open source. However, in recent years, many platforms have made excessive efforts to open source, resulting in uneven input and output, platform losses and other problems. These adverse effects have jeopardized the healthy development of China′s software platform industry. Therefore, it is necessary to explore how the openness of the software platform affects its innovation performance.Existing researches on the relationship between openness and innovation performance mainly focus on the firm level, while the analysis of platform openness is mainly qualitative research. Meanwhile, few studies discussed platform innovation performance, and the existing studies focus on the construction of platform innovation performance indicator system, so there is a lack of researches on the application of these indicators for empirical testing. Moreover, there are few empirical studies on the influence of software platform openness on the overall innovation performance of the platform. In addition, as an important ability of software platform to attract third-party developers to access and enrich platform functions, platform appeal plays a key role in the process that openness affects the innovation performance of software platform. However, few studies have explored how it acts on the formation process of platform innovation performance as a situational factor.Therefore, combining the open innovation theory and platform governance theory, this study systematically explores the influence of platform openness on platform innovation performance, and the moderating effect of platform appeal on the above processes. The openness of the software platform indicates the extent to which the platform opens its resources to third-party developers, which is embodied in platform open breadth and platform open depth. Based on the software platform′s attributes, architecture characteristics and corresponding behavior carriers, platform innovation performance is mainly reflected in three aspects: platform development performance, platform distribution performance and platform operation performance. Platform appeal is mainly manifested in user scale, service level and commercial liquidity. This study argues that the platform open breadth and depth have different effects on platform innovation performance, and platform appeal will moderate the above processes. Based on this, the study carries on the theoretical analysis and puts forward the research hypotheses. Empirical test was taken with selected 30 online and listed (2008 to 2015) software platforms of China as samples. Through the collection and collation of the open data about these 30 software platforms on the Internet, such as the official website of software platform，the annual financial reports of listed enterprises, and the research reports on technology websites, the non-balance panel data composed of 134 pieces of data was obtained. In terms of variables measurement, first, this study argues that the platform, as an "intermediate organization", the measurement of its innovation performance is different from that of a single firm. So, combined with the existing literature research results, the initial scale was sorted out, then, through questionnaires and interviews with 6 experts in this field, a formal platform innovation performance scale was obtained. Second, the platform open breadth and depth are measured respectively by the number of API interfaces provided by the platform and the proportion of unbounded interface to total interface. Finally, for the measurement of platform appeal, this study used the number of monthly active users to measures the scale of platform users, and used the score of services provided by the platform to measure its service level, and used the score of four main ways of software platform liquidation to measure their commercial liquidity. In addition, the size and type of platform dominant enterprises, and the duration of platform opening are used as three control variables. This study used hierarchical regression analysis to test research hypotheses. Specifically, according to the data type of the dependent variables, different estimation methods were selected. For the model group involves in platform development performance, the mixed effect model and negative binomial regression were used for parameter estimation; for the model groups involve in platform distribution and operation performance, the random effect model and GLS regression were used for parameter estimation.The research findings show that open breadth has positive impacts on all the three dimensions of platform innovation performance, while open depth has inverted U-shaped results on them. In the above process, the moderating effects of three aspects of platform appeal are different, i.e. the most of the hypotheses that the positive moderating effects of open breadth are not verified or the moderating effects are not significant, but the moderating effects of open depth are inconsistently. Specifically, user scale significantly positively moderates the impact of open depth on platform development performance, service level and commercial liquidity both positively moderate the impact of open depth on platform development performance and distribution performance. This study expands the theory of open innovation and platform governance, and has significance for systematical understand of the relationship between software platform′s openness and its innovation performance as a whole, and important enlightens to promoting the transformation and upgrading of platform industry, improving the platform open decision of dominant enterprises and accelerating open innovation efficiency. First, not all platforms and their developers can benefit from openness, and the larger platform openness is not always better. Platform appeal is a double-edged sword, managers or owners of platform require a rational balance between the effect of increasing appearance and the cost. In addition, the complex platform ecosystem contains many internal mechanisms and operation law that are unknown or inconsistent with conventional cognition, meanwhile, China′s software platform industry is growing rapidly, but there are still many problems. So, it is worthwhile for researchers to do further explorations.

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