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Dr. H. (Hakan) Özalp

Faculty of Economics and Business
Section Strategy & International Business
Photographer: Sander Nieuwenhuys

Visiting address
  • Plantage Muidergracht 12
Postal address
  • Postbus 15953
    1001 NL Amsterdam
Contact details
  • CV and Profile

    I am an Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam. I hold my PhD in Business Administration and Management and MSc in Economics and Management of Innovation and Technology from Bocconi University, and my BSc in Management Engineering from Istanbul Technical University. Previously I worked at VU Amsterdam and Leeds University Business School and was a postdoc at LMU Munich.

    My research explores the antecedents and the impact of industrial and technological change on platform ecosystems, firms, and innovation-based competition taking place within these ecosystems and across firms. I taught and coordinated various courses on innovation, strategy, and research methods.

  • Research

    Research Interests: Platform Ecosystems; Technological Change; Industry Dynamics; Modularity; Regulation; Video Game Industry

    In my research, I study the strategic and technological implications of platform companies and platform-based ecosystems. Technology companies and particularly platform companies, represent an ever more important share of the modern economy, while existing strategic management theories do not fully capture many of the strategic tradeoffs that platform companies face. My work attempts to address these gaps at the intersection of the literatures on platform-based ecosystems, technological change, and innovation strategy. My work is predicated on the fact that the growth of these platform companies has been driven by underlying technological shifts, and therefore in my work I have multiple research trajectories where I attempt to study how: a) how technological change impacts the structure of a platform ecosystem, b) changes the strategy or direction of innovation by firms, and c) human capital (knowledge workers) impacted by these technological changes.

    I adopt a strategic and evolutionary view of these relationships as I study the temporal changes as a result of these technologies, drawing on multiple theoretical perspectives. Much of my work has studied the Video Game Industry, as this is a context where it is possible to study the evolution of an industry over a 30-year timeframe with detailed information about the full population of products, firms, employees, strategies and technological shifts. While I am primarily a quantitative researcher and much of my work leverages econometrics, and increasingly machine learning methods, I also have papers that leverage the rich qualitative nature of this context to enrich our understanding of the mechanisms behind the work. My research has clear implications for both our understanding of platform strategy, as well the broader fields of strategic management and innovation management, that increasingly speak to digital technology firms.

    My work broadly fits into two separate streams of research. First, my work looks at the impact of technological shifts in the context of platform ecosystems. This work tries to understand how platforms decisions impact subsequent market outcomes, by exploiting changes which occurred in the underlying technology that exogenous impacted the strategies of the platforms. Second, my work tries to understand strategies of those firms that operate on top of platforms, or as part of a platform ecosystem. This speaks to how platform complementors adopt strategies, particularly in terms of the tools and technologies that they use and how this translates into product success, impacts platform dynamics, influences the direction of innovation, and shapes the mobility and value of human capital assets.

    I hold multiple awards for my research from Academy of Management, Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) Division (2017; 2024) and EURAM Strategic Management SIG (2022).

  • Publications

    2024

    • Fa, C., & Özalp, H. (2024). Platform Design Change and User Engagement: A Natural Experiment on Twitter. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2024)

    2023

    2022

    2019

    • Ozalp, H., & Kretschmer, T. (2019). Follow the Crowd or Follow the Trailblazer? The Differential Role of Firm Experience in Product Entry Decisions in the US Video Game Industry. Journal of Management Studies, 56(7), 1452-1481. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12389
    • Pereira, J., Tavalaei, M. M., & Ozalp, H. (2019). Blockchain-based platforms: Decentralized infrastructures and its boundary conditions. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 146, 94-102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2019.04.030

    2018

    • Cennamo, C., Ozalp, H., & Kretschmer, T. (2018). Platform architecture and quality trade-offs of multihoming complements. Information Systems Research, 29(2), 461-478. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2018.0779
    • Ozalp, H., Cennamo, C., & Gawer, A. (2018). Disruption in Platform-Based Ecosystems. Journal of Management Studies, 55(7), 1203-1241. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12351

    2017

    • Ozalp, H., & Cennamo, C. (2017). Platform architecture, multihoming and complement quality: Evidence from the U.S. video game industry. Academy of Management proceedings, 2017, Article 228. https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.2017.228

    2023

    Prize / grant

    • Fa, C. & Özalp, H. (2024). TIM Division Best Paper Award Finalist at AoM Annual Conference.
    • Özalp, H. (2022). Best Reviewer Award.
    • Fa, C., Ramezan Zadeh, T., Özalp, H. & Volberda, H. (2022). Best Paper Award.
    • Özalp, H. (2017). TIM Best Paper Award Finalist.

    Others

    • Fa, C. (participant), R. Zadeh, M. T. (participant), Özalp, H. (participant) & Volberda, H. (participant) (30-9-2023). Strategic Management Society Annual Conference (participating in a conference, workshop, ...).
    • Fa, C. (participant), R. Zadeh, M. T. (participant), Özalp, H. (participant) & Volberda, H. (participant) (14-6-2023 - 16-6-2023). EURAM 2023, Dublin. Platform integration as a double-edged sword in the complementary market: How platform integration affects knowledge sharing among incumbent (…) (participating in a conference, workshop, ...). https://conferences.euram.academy/2023conference/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/10/EURAM-2023-Programme-for-Web.pdf
    This list of publications is extracted from the UvA-Current Research Information System. Questions? Ask the library or the Pure staff of your faculty / institute. Log in to Pure to edit your publications. Log in to Personal Page Publication Selection tool to manage the visibility of your publications on this list.
  • Ancillary activities
    No ancillary activities