The Secret of the Killer App
How many apps should you make to maximise your chances of landing a killer app? This issue has been examined closely by Pai-Ling Yin, co-founder of the Mobile Innovation Group, a research collaboration between MIT and Stanford. She and her researchers have discovered this rule of thumb: The most successful game developers focus on creating many highly varied products and releasing them quickly, while the most successful non-game developers tend to build one strong app and add incremental improvements over time.
Pai-Ling Yin’s most recent paper with Jason Davis (INSEAD) and Yulia Muzyrya (University of Michigan) is “Market-Specific Innovation Strategies in Entrepreneurial Firms: Killer Apps in the iPhone Ecosystem”. Using data gathered from the iTunes App Store, the authors find that the effectiveness of different strategies depends on two market conditions: 1) the degree of resemblance between the market and another more established market, and 2) demand preferences in the market where entrepreneurs innovate.
While visiting CESifo, Pai-Ling Yin will be continuing her research on mobile applications. She is also working with Tobias Kretschmer as guest editor for a special issue of International Journal of Industrial Organization on “The Economics of Information and Communication Technologies”.
Pai-Ling Yin is a Social Science Research Scholar at Stanford University’s Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). Previously, she was a professor of technology and strategy at MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School. She serves as an associate editor for Information Economics and Policy. Ms Yin holds an MS (with distinction) from the London School of Economics and a PhD in Economics from Stanford University.