Platform synergy and innovation speed of SMEs: The roles of organizational design and regional environment

The prevalence of platform-based business models, enabled by the advancements of digital technologies, has tremendously changed the way how individual firms innovate. This study seeks to understand the heterogeneity of innovation speed among SMEs acting as participant complementors in digital platform. Integrating a knowledge-based view with the recent research on platform synergy, this study explores the effects of two kinds of platform synergy (i.e. synergy with platform owners, and synergy with other complementors) have on the innovation speed of SMEs. The results suggest that platform owners and fellow complementors would furnish different sets of information and knowledge, which are complementary in nature. In addition, SMEs with different organizational structure and geographic locations may benefit differently from the two kinds of platform synergy. Our synergy-based explanations make an important theoretical contribution to the growing literature on platform ecosystem from a complementor’s perspective.