All around us, there are signs that we are entering an era of unprecedented technological and societal change. Online auctions, crowdsourced encyclopedias, open source software and peer-to-peer sharing of music files were early heralds of a new way of organizing human interactions. More...

Most digital platforms are inherently versatile partly because their software code can be modified, but primarily because they are designed as open-ended modular stacks whose affordances increase with the variety of functionalities provided by the upper layers, without needing to rewire or...

This paper tries to shine a light on the seemingly paradoxical role of resource scarcity as help, rather than hindrance, to innovation. It does so by showing that Minecraft's remarkable success has been the result of a fertile set of design and business model choices, some of which were due to...

Currently, all major IT and telecom firms are busy trying to stimulate non-contractual complementary developments around their own core competences and offerings. But little has been done to explain the logic, strengths and weaknesses of non-contractual innovation. The literature on open...

This paper intends to illustrate and make more explicit the decentralization argument put forward in the literature on platform leadership. The analysis shows that in the digital economy, where rapid scalability and evolve-ability are so important, decentralization has played a crucial role in...

Digital transformations: an introduction / F. Xavier Olleros and Majlinda Zhegu -- Part I sectoral analyses -- 1. How online learning will transform legal education / David I. C. Thomson -- 2. The digital future of the oldest information profession / Ray Worthy Campbell -- 3. Medicine in the age...

Inspired by the open source software (OSS) movement, Wikipedia has gone further than any OSS project in decentralizing its quality control task. This is seen by many as a fatal flaw. In this short paper, I will try to show that it is rather a shrewd and fertile design choice. First, I will...

Inspired by the work of Eric von Hippel on ‘free innovation’ and Stefania Milan on activist movements, I define ‘beyonders’ as agents who express their dissatisfaction about a current economic regime not by trying to change it, as innovative insiders or outsiders would, but by trying to...