Edinburgh Napier University

  Increasing competitive pressures are leading companies to innovate through digital platforms. The dominant theme within extant research on innovation in these platforms conceptualises two different processes: Generativity (Tilson et al., 2010; Yoo et al., 2012) and generification (Hanseth and Bygstad, 2015; Pollock et al., 2007). Each of the conceptualisations gives extensive accounts separately, but they have questionable ability to provide a full understanding of innovation in digital platforms when there is a plural occurrence of these processes (Sørensen and Williams, 2002). Drawing on an analysis of rich archival data complemented by interviews reporting five-year relationship between a platform owner and its customer, we revisited underlying assumptions of its processes. We argue that generativity and generification are related to each other in a constant flux in which one fuels the other. In this relation, control has new roles other than as key factor for innovation productiv ity (cf. Eaton et al., 2015; Yoo et al., 2012), and it is subordinated to the purpose of innovation. As a consequence, innovation purpose seems to constrain the ‘control vs autonomy’ paradox (Lyytinen et al., 2017).