Customer behavior and adoption · Large-scale quantitative developer-platform-month panel study supported by qualitative research; platform adoption is identified from developers' software projects and analyzed around attendance at hackathons, with channels including sponsorship, soc
Platform diffusion at temporary gatherings: Social coordination and ecosystem emergence
Tommy Pan Fang, Andy Wu, David R. Clough (2021). Platform diffusion at temporary gatherings: Social coordination and ecosystem emergence. Strategic Management Journal. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3230.
Plain-English take
Attending temporary hackathon gatherings serves as a social forum for platform diffusion: sponsorship, social learning, knowledge exchange, and social coordination help developers learn about and adopt platforms. For your marketing: Use it as a product, platform or behavior mechanism reference rather than a direct forecast for a SaaS funnel.
How much weight to give this
3/5 Moderate evidence for a specific setting
The 1–5 evidence-check score is a practical reading aid, not a formal peer review or a probability that a conclusion is true. It combines design strength (2 points), sample reporting (1), comparison/control clarity (1), and how much of the paper could be checked (1). Access affects how confidently this directory can assess a study, not the study's underlying quality. Blinding is reported separately because it is not relevant to every design.
Large-scale quantitative developer-platform-month panel study supported by qualitative research; platform adoption is identified from developers' software projects and analyzed around attendance at hackathons, with channels including sponsorship, social learning, knowledge exchange, and social coordination.
1,302 software developers attending 167 hackathons; the main dataset is a developer-platform-month panel with 786,240 observations, covering January 2012–November 2017 and platform use detected through platform-specific API keywords in public GitHub projects.
Based on the publisher-described design and comparison; see the article for complete analysis.
Publisher record was fetched directly; full text was not assumed open.
Double-blind? Blinding was not established from the retrieved publisher record.
Research question
What the authors investigated
Does attending a temporary gathering such as a hackathon affect software developers' platform choices, and through which social mechanisms does platform adoption diffuse among attendees?
Design
Large-scale quantitative developer-platform-month panel study supported by qualitative research; platform adoption is identified from developers' software projects and analyzed around attendance at hackathons, with channels including sponsorship, social learning, knowledge exchange, and social coordination.
Sample and setting
1,302 software developers attending 167 hackathons; the main dataset is a developer-platform-month panel with 786,240 observations, covering January 2012–November 2017 and platform use detected through platform-specific API keywords in public GitHub projects.
Reported result
What the study found
Attending temporary hackathon gatherings serves as a social forum for platform diffusion: sponsorship, social learning, knowledge exchange, and social coordination help developers learn about and adopt platforms.
This is a paraphrase of the source. Check the original paper for definitions, estimates, statistical uncertainty and analysis details.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
The publisher page does not state a limitations section; this is therefore not stated by the publisher page fetched in this run.
Possible founder application
Use it as a product, platform or behavior mechanism reference rather than a direct forecast for a SaaS funnel.
Evidence access
Publisher abstract/metadata retrieved; consult the linked paper for full methods and tables.
The publisher research summary explicitly describes a large-scale quantitative study of 1,302 developers and 167 hackathons supported by qualitative research, and frames hackathons as a forum for diffusion of platform adoption; the methods page reports 786,240 developer-platform-month observations. Direct publisher-page retrieval was recorded on 2026-10-09; profile summarizes the accessible record and does not claim independent review of inaccessible full text.
If only an abstract or metadata was available, the profile is limited to claims supported there. A paper's paywall does not change its evidentiary status, but it limits what we can substantiate from accessible text.