Strategic Management of Digital Platform Ecosystems in Nigeria: Value Creation, Governance, and Competitive Dynamics

This dissertation develops a comprehensive theoretical account of strategic management in digital platform ecosystems in Nigeria, addressing value creation mechanisms, governance architecture design, and competitive dynamics among platform competitors. The explosive growth of Nigerian digital platforms across e-commerce, fintech, and logistics creates an urgent theoretical need for Africa-situated platform strategy frameworks. Platform theory, ecosystem theory, and competitive dynamics theory provide the theoretical scaffolding. Using an interpretive research paradigm, the study combines multiple case studies of nine Nigerian digital platform firms with longitudinal analysis of platform market structure data from 2019 to 2024. Executive interviews, product strategy documents, and platform ecosystem mapping exercises provided the empirical material. Abductive analysis integrating theoretical constructs with empirical patterns was applied. Findings indicate that Nigerian platform ecosystems are characterized by distinct governance challenges arising from low digital trust, fragmented payment infrastructure, and high platform switching costs among SME participants. The study develops the concept of trust-anchored ecosystem governance as a Nigeria-specific platform strategy principle where behavioral guarantees and dispute resolution mechanisms must be explicitly embedded in platform design to achieve scale. Competitive dynamics among Nigerian platforms follow an intensification-consolidation cycle compressing traditional industry competitive dynamics. The dissertation makes significant theoretical contributions to platform theory by introducing context-sensitive governance frameworks for low-trust market environments. Keywords: digital platform ecosystems, strategic management, Nigeria, platform governance, value creation.