While digital platforms have the potential to disrupt or transform industries, it remains unclear how platform organizations achieve network effects in complex industry contexts. Drawing on a unique setting of a platform-driven transformation of the fast-moving consumption-good industry, this case study reveals how industry complexity and task complexity rooted in an established industry architecture cut off the positive feedback of network effects. We propose a process model to theorize how a novel, “hybrid’ business model, i.e., a multi-platform configuration, emerges to overcome these impediments and transfer the industry successfully. It suggests that, in addition to facilitating cross-side interaction, a viable platform business model needs to achieve resource mobilization and resource combination, both of which are contingent on the industry context where it operates.
