Abstract
Digital platforms are known to support innovation by facilitating interactions between the platform and the actors in an ecosystem. However, research on such platforms are often focused on commercially motivated platforms where value is seen as profit. Less is known about digital platforms that support innovation as a digital global public good. Motivated by the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, the importance of digital innovation as response, and the global nature of the situation, this thesis presents a qualitative case study of how a software platform supported digital innovation in two countries as a digital global public good. Two research questions are asked: How can digital global public good software platforms support digital innovation?, and 2) How can our understanding of digital global public goods be informed by digital innovation and software platforms? The study finds three supporting factors of innovation, namely 1) enabling adoption of software by being freely downloadable, modifiable, and redistributable as open source software, 2) offering existing, customizable and generic software applications in a layered modular architecture, and 3) leveraging on local capacities, efforts and collaborations in the ecosystem. Additionally, this thesis contributes with a discussion of how digital global public goods can be understood by digital innovation and software platforms by arguing 1) that the supporting factors of innovation in the software platform can be linked to its nature of being a DGPG, and 2) seeing the supporting factors of innovation together, a platform ecosystem can generate positive network effects that can benefit all.