Platform-based competition has fundamentally transformed competitive dynamics in digital markets by shifting the locus of rivalry from firm-level products to multi-sided ecosystems sustained by network effects and orchestrated participation. This integrative review synthesizes theoretical and empirical insights from peer-reviewed scholarship to examine how digital marketplaces, network externalities, and ecosystem strategies reshape value creation, competitive advantage, and strategic positioning. Early foundations in two-sided market theory established the centrality of cross-side and same-side network effects in driving platform scale and winner-take-most outcomes. Subsequent scholarship advanced understanding of platform envelopment, multihoming, complementor dynamics, and governance tensions between openness and control. The review identifies persistent strategic paradoxes: platforms must simultaneously encourage generativity to fuel innovation while safeguarding value appropriation and architectural integrity. By organizing the literature into a conceptual synthesis, the paper illuminates the interdependent layers through which platform leaders coordinate users and complementors, navigate openness-control trade-offs, and evolve in response to competitive feedback. Contributions include bridging fragmented perspectives across strategy, information systems, and economics, highlighting the temporal evolution from network effects to ecosystem orchestration, and delineating future research directions for platform evolution amid rapid technological change and regulatory scrutiny. The analysis underscores that sustainable competitive advantage in platform markets derives less from proprietary assets than from dynamic capabilities in governance, orchestration, and adaptive ecosystem design.
Management research has increasingly recognized data as a critical organizational resource, yet its precise theoretical status remains fragmented across competing scholarly traditions. This narrative review examines how the literature conceptualizes data’s role in strategy, capability development, and competitive advantage, focusing on the transition from raw data to strategic value. We synthesize key theoretical perspectives, including the resource-based view, dynamic capabilities, information processing theory, and organizational learning, to analyze how data is positioned as a resource, a capability input, and an infrastructural condition. The review identifies three central themes: the conceptual progression from data to strategic value, the organizational enablers of data-driven capability, and persistent theoretical ambiguities regarding data’s ontological status. We argue that data’s strategic value is neither inherent nor automatic but emerges through complex processes of governance, interpretation, and integration with organizational routines. The analysis highlights unresolved debates about whether data constitutes a primary resource, a foundational capability, or a dynamic asset whose value is contingent on context. This review offers a synthesized framework to guide future research on data-centric strategy and informs managerial understanding of the organizational conditions required to convert data into sustainable competitive advantage.
Institute for Management, Business, and Accounting Studies