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1. Introduction and theoretical background
With the advance of the digital economy, ecosystems have challenged established
wisdoms about institutional entities, progressively transforming original places of
networking and community building into actual economic organizations (Santos and
Eisenhardt, 2005). Platform-gravitating ecosystems are new and interesting
collaborative forms of bringing together different types of economic actors who
consistently interact in a variety of ways and exchange value (Alstyne et al., 2016).
In particular, what sets ecosystems apart is the idea of complementarity achieved by
the way multilateral links among resources, activities and outputs of several affiliated
organizations confer them unique advantages that could not emerge otherwise
(Jacobides et al., 2018).
In order to make such core interactions possible, platforms must perform three key
functions: pull participants to the use of the platform, by making it attractive;
facilitate value-creating interactions through appropriate tools; and match the right
users with one another on a mutually rewarding basis (Parker et al., 2016). A failure
to strike a balance among these three actions will hinder the emergence of valuable
network effects– the real driving force behind successful platforms- i.e. the larger the
network, the greater the value generated.
Having said that, the study of TripAdvisor is a starling example of how the
enlargement of the economic and organizational scope of these digital ecosystems is
actually determined by its ability to use technology as a resource, transforming users’
activities into data and eventually into value created and shared (Barrett et al., 2015).
2. The TripAdvisor case
Founded in 2000, TripAdvisor has become one of the main actors of the global travel
and hospitality industry within the international arena. Over a time–span of 20 years,
it went through a peculiar evolutionary pattern, moving from a travel search engine
to a salient social media platform and, subsequently, to a central hub of a complex
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data-service ecosystem. In this regard, the thorough empirical analysis put forth by
Alaimo et al. (2020) has shown how the history of the TripAdvisor platform has
evolved along three major components, i.e. configuration of actors, technological
functionalities and data, which are indeed nothing but the three main elements that
underpin ecosystem formation.
Born as a search-oriented platform where the only source of revenue was
advertisement, TripAdvisor soon became a social media platform in which end-users
acted no longer as mere information seekers, but as actual producers of contents and
data on the basis of which the platform developed services like hotel and popularity
indexes and provided personalized offerings to travelers (Livingston, 2007). It is not
until the beginning of 2012, with the introduction of price comparison and booking
features, that TripAdvisor starts to portray itself as an “all–in-one-place destination
for travelers” or data service ecosystem (Alaimo et al., 2020).
This third and last stage of TripAdvisor’s evolution is marked by the launch of end–
