Extending the international new venture phenomenon to digital platform providers : A longitudinal case study

Abstract

People increasingly interact with services enabled by digital platforms. This has been a consequence of the digitalization of artifacts, which has transmuted traditional businesses into digital forms. With the increasing digitalization and modularization of services, digital platforms have given many digital service providers possibilities to scale globally, and to rapidly transcend national borders by serving multi-sided markets. However, we still know very little about how digital platform providers actually internationalize their services, or how they make their platforms available for global markets. In this paper, we contribute to the increasing literature on digital-based INVs, examining how firms of this type internationalize their services, and more specifically, how recent technological developments have shaped the firms’ internationalization processes. Drawing on concepts from the network approach to internationalization, resource dependency theory, and INV theory, we extend the scope of INV theory via a model that encompasses the internationalization process of digital platform providers. We report on a longitudinal case study of a digital platform provider (covering the period 2000–2017), which allowed us to gain in-depth insight into the INV phenomenon.