Understanding the dynamics of value co-creation in a digital platform ecosystem: The case of mobile money in Malawi

In the new global economy, digital innovations and their related platforms are becoming pervasive and powerful primarily because they enable transactions between different actors and facilitate value co-creation. Mobile money is a digital innovation with potential transformative power, particularly for societies in the global South, such as Sub-Saharan Africa. This has resulted in governments, such as Malawi, supporting the introduction of mobile money as a digital innovation that can assist in tackling various social challenges, including financial inclusion. Despite the numerous benefits that mobile money offers, as evidenced by the M-Pesa story in Kenya, replicating its success across various countries in the global South has been challenging. The reasons for the variable results of mobile money deployments largely remain unclear. However, extensive research conducted suggests that the successful adoption and uptake of mobile money as a digital innovation has largely been country-specific and unbalanced. Literature conceptualises mobile money as a digital innovation organised around an ecosystem and operates in different ways across distinct contexts to create value. Perhaps one of the contributing factors to the variable outcomes of mobile money is the fact that digital innovation involves different actors and elements who interact to co-create value in the ecosystem. Therefore, to understand these variable outcomes, this study proposes using an ecosystem lens to explore how different actors and components are involved in value co- creation in a mobile money ecosystem. Consequently, this study aims to understand the dynamics of value co-creation in a mobile money ecosystem in a Global South context and Malawi in particular. The study adopted a qualitative research design underpinned by an interpretivist philosophical paradigm using an inductive approach to theory development. The case study has been defined as exploratory in nature due to the opportunity such an approach offers to research a complex phenomen within their contexts. A reflexive thematic analysis was adopted for the data analysis to give the research process in general and analysis in particular credibility through critical questioning of various researcher actions. The research findings reveal challenges in the structural elements and constraints caused by the governance practices of the platform owner that impacted ecosystem value co-creation across the three stages of the ecosystem lifecycle. The challenges include insufficient attention given to the role of the digital platform in facilitating value co-creation, co-innovation issues due to the platform architecture and diminished role of end users in the innovation process. The results further indicate that although value co-creation was nurtured by partially opening the digital platform, the control mechanisms adopted for the platform at various levels of the ecosystem hindered the ecosystem interactions and thus affected value co-creation with third parties. The findings further show that other contextual factors and transparency challenges prevented complementors from fully harnessing the generativity of the platform to co-create value. These constraints include regulatory barriers and lack of visibility of the boundary resources and acceptance criteria to be allowed access to the platform which prevented participation of third party actors in value co-creation. These challenges contributed to the emergence of a disintermediating governance role of a gatekeeper to platform functionality through a hub solution. The results enable the development of an integrative framework which can assist in understanding the dynamics of value co-creation in the mobile money ecosystem. The research concludes by providing the theoretical and practical implications of the study. The proposed integrative framework offers three main areas to be analysed to explore the dynamics of value co-creation in mobile money ecosystems: governance of value co-creation, ecosystem value co-creation and context. Most notably, the integrative framework helps identify the opportunities, challenges, bottlenecks or tensions between and across the different ecosystem actors and elements. The implications offer guidance on the need for practitioners in the Global South to engage and support end users and local entrepreneurs in building inclusive services, endeavour to optimally open access to platforms and develop enabling policy and regulation that supports value co-creation.