Legitimizing Nascent Platforms: The Dynamics and Complementarities of Strategic Framing

Nascent platforms face important legitimacy issues arising from the need to gain visibility and to meet the expectations of users and complementors on whom the platform depends for its success. Heterogeneity in these stakeholders’ expectations and the absence of demonstrable value in the early stages escalate such legitimacy issues. We investigate how platform sponsors may deal with these challenges by using framing strategies that complement technological and economic strategies to convince audiences that the new platform is credible, legitimate, and valuable. Our framework identifies firm- and ecosystem-specific issues as two boundary conditions that determine the nature and sequence of framing strategies. We derive framing strategy archetypes—disruptive and sustaining framing—and highlight how these can add to the platform’s technological and economic strategies by either making their salient aspects more noticeable (supplementary effect) or neutralizing the hazards of those strategies (compensatory effect). These complementarities between framing and other strategies help the sponsor deal with the tensions in creating a new platform.