Managing Open Innovation through Digital Boundary Control: The Case of Multi-Sided Platforms in the Collaborative Economy

The sharing economy is a growing sector that is profiting from digitalization by developing multi-sided platforms allowing users to create and manage valuable transactions around products and services. However, for companies, this type of platform requires the implementation of opening processes to provide internal resources in order to help users interact between them and to innovate. This poses a problem of the openness control of boundaries of the company and the platform, which the present research proposes to study. Through the comparative study of several multi-sided platforms, we show that the control mechanisms depend on the type of boundary and the nature of the opening. We also analyze the role of the platform, technological tools and governance in the dynamic management of these boundaries, and the management of open innovation.