On April 2nd, 2025, Coen van der Geest successfully defended his doctoral thesis titled "Looking Under the Hood: Understanding the Trade-Offs in Leveraging Platform Architectures".
Coen van der Geest's dissertation explores the trade-offs involved in using platform architectures for innovation and value creation. By exposing core components through standardized interfaces (APIs), platforms enable third-party developers to create new products and services. This brings several benefits, such as recombination, evolvability, and standardization. However, these advantages come with significant trade-offs:
- Recombination vs. Constraints: APIs allow for the recombination of platform components but can limit future flexibility.
- Innovation vs. Stability: Platform architectures must evolve to foster innovation but need stability to reduce uncertainty for developers.
- Efficiency vs. Complexity: Standardization enhances efficiency and scalability, but some complexity is necessary to meet diverse needs.
Through three independent empirical studies, Coen highlights these trade-offs, showing that while platform architectures offer substantial benefits, they require careful navigation of inherent challenges. The findings provide valuable insights for both theory and practice in information systems, management, and digital innovation.
Coen's research was supervised by Bart van den Hooff, Hans Berends, and Joey van Angeren who provided invaluable guidance throughout his PhD journey. He has been appointed an Assistant Professor at the Department of Digitalization at Copenhagen Business School, where he continues to study digital platform architectures, IT architectures, and digital infrastructures.