Success and Failure of Collaboration Platforms

Collaboration platforms are inter-organizational application systems for supporting or enabling inter-firm co-operation and collaboration. Although a number of collaboration platforms emerged from electronic marketplaces their underlying business logic differs significantly. Electronic marketplaces focus on negotiated pricing whereas collaboration platforms support or facilitate inter-firm collaboration and electronic integration within inter-organizational arrangements such as supply chains. Despite the economic benefits indicated by traditional approaches like transaction cost theory or resource dependency theory, in practice collaboration platforms often lack of participants’ acceptance. There are a number of empirical studies that have been carried out, but only a few of them are based on comprehensive, multi-dimensional theoretical frameworks. In this paper the need for a multi-disciplinary approach for acceptance and adoption studies of collaboration platforms in order to investigate why some platforms succeed whereas others fail is discussed.