Coen van der Geest's Research Visit at BI Norwegian Business School

A PhD candidate from the KIN Center for Digital Innovation, Coen van der Geest, is currently on a research visit at BI Norwegian Business School. Part of the visit involves collaborating with researchers from BI, where they look at which technological features from digital platforms different software developers are more likely to include in their products.

Coen van der Geest is currently undertaking a two-month research visit at the Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at BI Norwegian Business School, Norway’s largest private business school. During this period, he is collaborating with Dr. Philipp Hukal and Dr. Johannes Loh (former BI now at VU) on a study that looks at the selective integration of platform features by software developers, which will form a part of his PhD dissertation.

Van der Geest’s PhD research aims to enhance our understanding of the organizational implications of digital technology for business operations and management. Focusing on the dynamics around digital architectures like organizational IT and platform architectures, he studies how these architectures are designed and used, and the consequences thereof.

His first paper co-authored with Dr. Joey van Angeren , titled "Architectural Generativity: Leveraging Complementor Contributions to the Platform Architecture" was published in California Management Review. Based on an in-depth analysis of the Mozilla Firefox web browser platform, they found that around 40% of all’architectural changes originate from suggestions provided by "complementors", those who develop products that integrate with the platform. Specifically, complementors propose new or improved ways to make the platform more secure or they propose entirely new features.

At BI Norwegian Business School van der Geest is studying how complementors (e.g. software developers) decide which technological features from digital platforms to include in their products. The platform architecture, which makes these features available, is a relatively unexplored way to encourage and potentially guide innovation. What sets this study apart is the use of data from different contexts, specifically a major web browser and a major game platform. Prior research has already made significant contributions to our understanding of digital platform architectures, which van der Geest aim’s to build upon and expand with the cross-platform analysis.

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Leveraging Complementor Contributions to Platform Architecture

Research suggests that platforms have limits to their generative capacity (e.g. producing unprompted innovation) due to finite resources available to complementors - those who create products for the platform.This process, called "architectural generativity," requires platform evolution to stimulate innovation. Complementors play a crucial role in suggesting architectural improvements, as evidenced by a study on Mozilla Firefox.