The Innovative Capabilities Of Digital Payment Platforms: A Comparative Study Of Apple Pay & Google Wallet

This study presents a model for studying the innovative capabilities of digital payment platforms in regards to open innovation integration and commercialization. We perceive digital platforms as layered modular IT artifacts, where platform governance and the configuration of platform layers impact the support for open innovation. The proposed model has been employed in a comparative case study between two digital payment platforms: Apple Pay and Google Wallet. The findings suggest that digital payment platforms make use of boundary resources to be highly integrative or integratable, which supports the intended conjoint commercialization efforts. Furthermore, the architectural design of digital platforms impacts the access to commercialization, resulting to an exclusion or inclusion strategy in accessing value opportunities. Our findings contribute to the open innovation and digital platform literature, by providing a deeper understanding how these digital platforms can be designed and configured to support open innovation.