How do digital platforms for ideas, technologies, and knowledge transfer act as enablers for digital transformation?

Digital platforms, along with their supporting tools and features, have emerged as important enablers for firms to leverage distributed knowledge (Sedera et al., 2016), because they offer new ways for organizations to collaborate with the external environment for ideas, technologies, and knowledge. Indeed, studies have explored efforts to promote such collaboration on digital platforms with various popular names, such as crowdsourcing platforms (Afuah & Tucci, 2012), open innovation platforms (Frey et al., 2011), and online marketplaces (Dushnitsky & Klueter, 2011). Among others, the open innovation phenomenon highlights that these platforms have a far-reaching impact on how various parties innovate together through alliances, networks, and ecosystems (West & Bogers, 2014). This impact is observable in the explosive surge in the popularity over the last decade of digital platforms for research and development (R&D), idea generation, prediction, freelance work, peer production, co-creation, product design, and public engagement, to name but a few. For example, Dell’s IdeaStorm (Hossain & Islam, 2015a) and Starbucks’ MyStarbucksIdea (Hossain & Islam, 2015b) are two digital crowdsourcing platforms that are used to engage crowds to solicit ideas from them (Bayus, 2013; Chua & Banerjee, 2013). Moreover, intermediary platforms, such as InnoCentive and IdeaConnection, are organizing online competitions to solve the problems of various organizations (Hossain, 2012). Although digital platforms provide new possibilities and competence, they however also bring new challenges for organizations, which call for new ways of organizing in order to fully embrace their potential. Understanding the role of these platforms in digital transformation is therefore crucial. We must recognize equally the opportunities and challenges digital platforms provide for organizations, and we need to understand the mechanisms and potential outcomes of various digital platforms. Consequently, we should consider digital platforms as a mechanism for accelerating the digital transformation endeavours many organizations are undertaking today (Berman, 2012). Despite the high significance of various digital platforms, there is limited knowledge in the extant literature about the effect of digital platforms on the organization. Thus, here we discuss how digital platforms for ideas, technologies, and knowledge transfer act as enablers for digital transformation.