Growth, Complexity, and Generativity of Digital Platforms:The Case of Otto.de

We study the growth, complexity, and generativity of a digital platform—Otto.de. Through a longitudinal analysis of the company’s 65 GitHub open source repositories over a period of 6.5 years, we find a) support for a superlinear growth pattern, b) a structural split in the platform into two clusters, and c) indication that more active repositories will be more generative and in turn more popular. These findings have implications for scholars studying platform evolution as well as for companies opening up their internal IT platforms.