Characteristics of Digital Platforms from a B2B Perspective – A Systematic Literature Review

This paper aims to identify characteristics of digital platforms and their specific manifestations in the B2B domain. Therefore, we conduct a systematic literature review of relevant IS journals and conferences to analyze platform characteristics from a B2B perspective. We determine that researchers use different terms homogeneously for the B2B platforms, e.g., IoT, IIoT, or digital industrial platform. Commonly analyzed characteristics in B2C—network effects and scalability, pricing and competition, platform openness, value co-creation and generativity, boundary resources, platform governance and control—can also be observed in the B2B domain but with different results and challenges, to which we propose avenues for future research. This paper contributes to the understanding of digital B2B platforms in IS literature by structuring existing research on B2B platforms and by providing starting points for future work