Innovation Platform Activity and Scope: Case Evidence and Future Research Directions

Innovation platforms are increasingly prevalent, yet we know little about the activities such platforms can and should support and how their scope can expand over time for effective platform positioning and revenue generation. This study examines three established innovation platforms—InnoCentive, GitHub, and Kaggle—to identify the different activities they enable for participants and how these differ across the three cases. Drawing on the literature on transactions, online communities, and innovation, a set of platform activities is identified. In this study, we assess how strongly each platform supports different activities and visualize the results using spider graphs. While innovation activities are strongly supported across the three cases, the level of support differs across specific innovation activities from one platform to another. In addition to support for innovation activities, some also broaden their scope to support engagement and/or transaction. These findings show that our approach is effective in identifying platform activity and scope for innovation platforms. In future work we will expand these cases to examine what drives platform activity support choices, how the activities and their scope evolve over time, and how platforms monetize these innovation, transaction, and engagement activities.