Digital platforms for development: Foundations and research agenda

Materialities and potentialities

The capacity for digital innovation platforms to enable an almost infinite scope of applications to be developed is also derived from the underlying material properties of digital technology and immaterial properties of digital information. The essence of a digital innovation platform is the ability for developers to take underlying platform functionality, accessed through APIs, and arrange it through the logic of algorithms into applications. This effort relies on the combinable and re-combinable properties of the non-material digital artefact (Faulkner & Runde, 2011) and benefits in turn from the generative potential of digital technologies (Zittrain, 2008) to enable an almost limitless variety of application innovation. Beyond this, as Yoo, Henfridsson, and Lyytinen (2010) point out, digital technologies such as mobile handsets and digital watches have properties of sensibility and addressability as their capabilities are enriched through the inclusion of sensor components. These components range from GPS and gyroscopes to track movement and positioning, which may enable for example applications increasing agricultural productivity, to electrodes that can measure and monitor bio-signals, with applications in healthcare. Access to these burgeoning sensor-based capabilities in applications is also opened up and enabled through APIs, which further enrichen the scope of platformbased innovation possibilities for development. The self-referential nature of digital technology (Yoo, Henfridsson, & Lyytinen, 2010) is such that digital technologies (e.g., software development kits) are required to innovate further digital technologies (e.g., applications). However, the increasing reach and ubiquity as well as reducing the cost of technologies is such that the locus and heterogeneity of innovation is broadening (Yoo, Henfridsson, & Lyytinen, 2010). The outcome is that digital innovation platforms enable both more access to innovate and an increasing pace of innovation, which was previously not possible.