Milena Di Nenno, Innov-acts hosted Marie Curie Fellow, presented at the 34th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2026), held on 15–17 June at Bocconi University and the University of Milan under the theme “Reimagining Digital Technology for Business, Management, and Society.”
Milena presented a research-in-progress paper titled “Complementor Influence on Platform Business Models: The Case of the Roblox Metaverse Ecosystem”. As the study of platforms tends to be top-down, with the owner of a platform setting the rules and shaping the businesses built on top of it, Milena’s research asks the opposite. Can the developers and creators who build on a platform push influence back the other way and actually reshape the platform owner’s own business model?
To explore this, the study draws on data from Roblox’s Developer Forum and identifies several mechanisms through which an increasingly proactive developer community leaves its mark on the platform itself: collective action, platform legitimisation, resource allocation decisions, and co-creation. The findings are preliminary, but they point toward a more two-directional view of how power and value move within metaverse ecosystems.
For Innov-Acts, hosting this work reflects our commitment to frontier research on digital platforms and the evolving dynamics between the organisations that run them and the communities that bring them to life.
This research is carried out as part of Milena Di Nenno’s MSCA fellowship hosted by Innov-Acts in the framework of the AGORA project.
