Online Professional Talk: A Comparative Analysis of Multi-App Developers in Mobile App Store

Chee-Wee Tan is a Professor at the Department of Digitalization in Copenhagen BusinessSchool (CBS), an Honorary Professor of Business Analytics and Digitalization at the Nottingham University BusinessS&lool China in the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), a Distinguished Research Smolar at theĀ· Farulty of Business in Lingnan Uni-ersitv (LU).

Given the exponential growth in new product launches and updates on open innovation platforms today, developers have to carefully formulate their product proliferation strategies for enhancing the visibility of and accessibility to their product in order to differentiate from rivals. Yet, there is a dearth of research that examines how such strategies play out for information products and their impact on developers.

To this end, we synthesize extant literature on ulfom1ation goods and product proliferation strategy to advance a theory of evolutionary information product proliferation strategy that delineates developer strategies into product development, product launch, and version upgrade to assess the competitive dynamics between developers and their rivals in innovation ecosystems. Distinguishing among competitive ratings and downloads as definitive outcomes of product proliferation, we discover that developers’ enactn1ent of product proliferation strategies relative to their rivals have an impact on the former’ s competitive ratings and downloads.