Taxonomy of Digital Platforms: A Platform Architecture Perspective

Abstract

Digital platforms—technical core artefacts augmented by peripheral third-party derivatives—afford organizations to integrate resources in networked business ecosystems. Although digital platforms widely differ in their configurations, digital platforms’ dimensions and characteristics to disentangle different digital platform configurations are under-researched. To bridge this void, we employ Nickerson et al.’s method for taxonomy development to systematically derive a taxonomy of digital platforms. Specifically, we embrace a platform architecture perspective to capture the configuration of digital platform’s components. The resultant taxonomy facilitates a more pronounced understanding and grouping of digital platforms as configurations of certain dimensions and characteristics. Our findings suggest that digital platforms exhibit characteristics on at least four dimensions—namely, infrastructure, core, ecosystem, and service dimensions. Second, through instantiating the taxonomy, we find that digital platforms that exhibit similar characteristics share identical architectural profiles and, therefore, belong to one of three digital platform archetypes—namely, orchestration, amalgamation, and innovation platforms.