Understanding digital platform ecosystems: A scoping review, integrative framework, and research agenda

Digital platform ecosystems (DPEs) have become central socio-technical arrangements for digital innovation, industry transformation, and business model renewal. Yet DPE research remains fragmented across studies that examine ecosystem emergence, operation, and impacts separately. Thus, we conduct a scoping review of information systems and related research to clarify what constitutes a DPE and to theorize how DPE dynamics unfold. Synthesizing prior definitions, we identify four constitutive dimensions: a focal digital platform, heterogeneous but interdependent actors, platform-mediated value creation and capture, and governance mechanisms embedded in broader environmental conditions. Synthesizing prior research on the drivers, evolutionary dynamics, and impacts of DPEs, we develop a complex adaptive systems-informed framework that explains DPE dynamics as a recursive, multi-level process. We show how platform structuring and actor enactment generate meso-level relational crystallization, how these relational patterns consolidate into ecosystem structures of power, capabilities, and dependence, and how such structures feed back into subsequent governance and actor behavior under environmental coupling. By recasting DPE dynamics as a set of multi-level mechanisms rather than descriptive labels, our review also identifies a new agenda for future research.