From Renting Economy to Sharing Economy: How Do Bike-Sharing Platforms Grow in the Digital Era?

How can bike-sharing platforms achieve sustained growth in the digital era where digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data are integrated? Existing studies have overlooked the critical role of digital intelligence technology in the transformation and breakthrough of such platforms to a certain extent. They have failed to analyze the impact of the particularity of resources in the bike-sharing platforms from a system level. Based on the multiple case study method, we explored the growth process of bike-sharing platforms. This process includes two core growth mechanisms: (1) digital intelligent technology reshapes the dominant growth logic of the organization. In other words, bike-sharing platforms have formed the leading logic of the growth of sharing economy and reshaped the organization's growth direction, control concept, and inter-organization relations. (2) Digital intelligent technology reconstructs the platforms’ resource management ability. In other words, under the growth logic of sharing economy, bike-sharing platforms have reconstructed their organizational structure, production mode, and cooperation mode. Our study brings new insights into the growth process of bike-sharing platforms, deepens the research in the field of resource arrangement, and further responds to scholars’ appeals.