Managing digital business platforms: A continued exercise in balancing renewal and refinement

Central to the evolution of a digital business platform is the organization’s ability to balance exploration (renewal) and exploitation (refinement) simultaneously. Drawing on prior research—including digital platforms, contradictory tensions, and organizational ambidexterity—and our own experience investigating digital business platforms in organizations, this article provides insights into how executives can manage this evolution successfully. More specifically, we present a framework recognizing three pairs of organizational capabilities (i.e., identifying-nourishing, expanding-legitimating, and augmenting-embedding) that enable balancing renewal and refinement of the platform over time. We close by providing critical managerial practices that executives can use in anticipating, adjusting, and evaluating the evolution of a digital business platform over time, including its initiation, development, and growth.     

Visions of development: the inevitable need for alternatives

This paper begins by looking at radical visions of development, such as those of Gandhi and Mao, which developing countries threw up in the twentieth century. But soon these visions were eclipsed by the technological vision of development, now being championed in India by its president, Abdul Kalam. The elites of the world believe that only the technology of the developed west can lead developing nations to the path of development. But they fail to recognise the linkages of this capitalist, technology-driven path with colonial exploitation and war. They overlook the insight, first stated by Rosa Luxembourg, that capitalist expansion presupposes non-capitalist or pre-capitalist territories that provide the markets required for capitalist growth. Thus the major failure of the capitalist technological vision is that it can only be a vision for selected nations, or for a selected few within nations. It can never be a vision for the whole world. For countries like India, therefore, an alternative vision of development is essential. This will require a political act of courage to delink from the developed nations and the development and refinement of alternative technology, much of which already exists. Educating the intelligentsia that a good society does not require the technological pursuit of unlimited prosperity, however, is a big challenge.     

Is health care a luxury? The debate revisited with new evidence from emerging economies

This paper studies the long-run relationship between health care expenditure and income using a panel data set of emerging economies over the period 1995–2012. The results show that expenditure on health care and income are non-stationary and cointegrated. After controlling for cross-sectional dependence and unobserved heterogeneity among different countries, we find that the income elasticity of health care is less than 1, indicating that health care is a necessity and not a luxury. Government expenditure and out-of-pocket expenditure turn out to be important determinants of health care expenditure. Among non-monetary factors, results show that old age dependency and female education seem to have significant bearings on health care expenditures. Policy recommendations suggest that government should increase spending on health care in emerging economies since higher incomes may not automatically translate into higher health care spending by the people of these countries.     

Productivity and Learning‐by‐exporting: A Firm‐level Analysis of Indian Manufacturing

In this paper, we examine whether firms become productive by learning through exporting. To this end, we estimate the production function using microdata of Indian manufacturing firms operating in the period 1991–2001. In contrast to studies on developed countries, our results provide evidence that Indian manufacturing firms are experiencing a rise in productivity through entering export markets and thus experience the learning effect. We also find that there is a productivity rise prior to exporting. Therefore, our results also support the self‐selection mechanism for exporting.