Latest Release! Dr. Shiyuan Liu’s Research Featured in Top-Tier Journal MIS Quarterly

　　Dr. Shiyuan (Eric) Liu, Assistant Professor at the College of Business and Public Management, Wenzhou-Kean University (first author and corresponding author), together with Professor Ola Henfridsson from the Herbert Business School, University of Miami, and Associate Professor Jochem Hummel and Professor Joe Nandhakumar from Warwick Business School, accomplished a research project entitled “The Complementor’s Dilemma: Navigating Growth Ambitions and the Dependency on Focal Actors in Platform Ecosystems.” The study has been published online in MIS Quarterly (UTD24, FT50), a top-tier international journal in management, marking Wenzhou-Kean University’s first breakthrough in publishing in a UTD24 journal in the field of management. This achievement signifies the university’s continuous growth in disciplinary development, research capacity, and international academic influence in management science.

刘博士在《MIS Quarterly》发表的论文

Research Highlights

How does an unknown complementor rise to fame in the shadow of platform giants? Hitting this growth ambition often triggers “the complementor’s dilemma” of (a) acting on the ambition but risk losing the platform support needed for that growth, or (b) relinquishing the growth ambition to ensure the platform support continues. This groundbreaking study dives deep into this dilemma by examining the meteoric rise of a Chinese short-form video platform, Douyin (known as TikTok outside of China), from 0.75M to 208M users in just two years. The Non-focal to Focal (NFTF) model reveals how the complementor’s dilemma evolves over time and provides a roadmap to navigate the dilemma, emphasizing the importance of reflecting on ecosystem momentum to make strategic moves at the right time.

About the Author

Shiyuan Liu, Ph.D. in Management, University of Warwick (2022); Postdoctoral Fellow, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden (2023); Assistant Professor at the College of Business and Public Management, Wenzhou-Kean University; Research Fellow at the Swedish Center for Digital Innovation; Selected into Wenzhou “Ouyue Talent Program”. Program committee member for the 44th (2023) and 45th (2024) International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). He serves as an anonymous reviewer for leading academic journals including Information Systems Research, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology, and Journal of Strategic Information Systems. His research focuses on digital platforms, digital innovation, digital transformation, and digital entrepreneurship.

Reference:

Liu, S., Henfridsson, O., Hummel, J., & Nandhakumar, J. (2025). The complementor’s dilemma: Navigating growth ambitions and the dependency on focal actors in platform ecosystems. MIS Quarterly, 49 (3), 1123-1152. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2024/17767