Governance Technology and Intellectual Property Strategies in the Platform Ecosystem

Platform ecosystems not only enable value creation; they increasingly govern the external actors who create that value. Developers, complementors, merchants, service providers, drivers, creators, and users interact through platform infrastructures that coordinate participation, manage risk, enforce rules, and shape how value is distributed. This project examines how such governance becomes embedded in technology itself.

The research develops the concept of Governance Technology to describe technology-embedded mechanisms through which platform firms govern interactions within platform ecosystems. Rather than treating platform governance only as a matter of rules, contracts, policies or managerial decisions, the project investigates governance as a direction of inventive effort that can be observed in firms’ technological portfolios. The project focuses on three core dimensions of Governance Technology:

  • Orchestration: technologies that coordinate actors, activities and resources across platform ecosystems, including matching, ranking, routing, API orchestration, interoperability, complement integration and demand or supply allocation.
  • Safeguarding: technologies that protect the integrity of platform interactions, including identity verification, fraud detection, reputation systems, safety monitoring, app review, certification, permissions and the detection of harmful or non-compliant behaviour.
  • Value Allocation: technologies that evaluate contributions and distribute economic value, including pricing, fees, commissions, incentives, rewards, subsidies, licensing, revenue sharing and earnings allocation.

Empirically, the project studies Governance Technology through large-scale patent portfolio analysis. It draws on patent data collected from Lens and PATSTAT, including data on more than 40 global transaction platform companies. It is developing a broader platform dataset that can support comparison across platform ecosystem contexts. The analysis combines theory-led construct development with human coding, human-AI analysis, NLP methods, and transformer-based patent representations, including PatentSBERTa, to identify and compare governance-oriented inventions in patent text.

The project contributes to platform ecosystem research by connecting platform architecture and platform governance. It asks how technology moves beyond enabling participation and innovation to become a means of governing ecosystem participants. It also contributes to innovation management and IP research by showing how patent portfolios can provide an empirical window into firms’ accumulated technological governance capacity. Ultimately, the project aims to explain how different platform firms build, combine, and evolve Governance Technology over time, and how these technological portfolios reflect the changing governance challenges of platform ecosystems.

Project lead: Qi Ang Du (qad20@cam.ac.uk)

Project team members: Prof Frank Tietze 

Related publications

Du, Q.A., Tietze, F., 2026. Governance Technology in Sharing Economy Platforms: A  Transaction Cost Perspective on Patent Portfolios. Presented at the R&D Management Conference, Manchester.

Du, Q.A., Tietze, F., 2025. Governance Technology in the Sharing Economy: A Literature Review and Conceptual Framework. Presented at the R&D Management conference, Pisa, Italy.