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korean management review - Vol. 51 , No. 2

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korean management review - Vol. 51, No. 2, pp. 369-388
Abbreviation: kmr
ISSN: 1226-1874 (Print)
Print publication date 30 Apr 2022
Received 12 Oct 2021 Accepted 17 Nov 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17287/kmr.2022.51.2.369
The Effect of Mobile App Portfolio Strategy on Mobile Developer’s Performance
MinSung Kim ; Woongjang Lee ; Kun Shin Im
(First Author) Korea Productivity Center (kms8773@gmail.com)
(Co-Author) School of Business, Yonsei University (woongjang.lee@yonsei.ac.kr)
(Corresponding Author) School of Business, Yonsei University (ksim@yonsei.ac.kr)
모바일 앱 포트폴리오 전략이 모바일 개발자의 성과에 미치는 영향

Copyright 2011 THE KOREAN ACADEMIC SOCIETY OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

What mobile app development strategy should the developer consider to survive and grow in hypercompetitive mobile application market? Mobile app market is one of the most rapidly growing segment in software market. Although mobile app market is a promising area, this positive perspective is not consistently applicable to app developers. In extremely competitive mobile app market, application developers would need to carefully consider and formulate app development strategies for success. To define the strategies, product portfolio management composing with app development speed, diversification speed, and switch speed is introduced. Quantitative analysis validating the statistical relationship between portfolio strategies and app developer’s financial performance is conducted. For this analysis, data from app developers with worldwide cumulative revenue estimate of over $100,000 were collected. As a result of data analysis, positive relationship between app development speed and developer’s financial performance was supported whereas diversification speed and switch speed had negative relationship with revenue. Theoretically, this research differs from the previous mobile app related studies. While previous studies used app ranking or user ratings as proxy for app performance, this study uses estimated sales volume as dependent variable which reflects more accurate and empirical performance.


Keywords: Mobile app, Mobile app portfolio strategy, Mobile app development strategy, Mobile app developers’ performance

Acknowledgments

This study was based on MinSung Kim’s master’s thesis.

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∙ The author MinSung Kim is a business consultant at KPC (Korea Productivity Center). He received bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and master’s degree in MIS from School of Business at Yonsei University. His research area includes IT strategy and IT performance evaluation.

∙ The author Woongjang Lee is a Ph.D. candidate at School of Business, Yonsei University. He graduated from the University of Manchester (BA in Economics) and Manchester Business School (MA in HRM). He worked as a business consultant at KPMG and Deloitte and founded a Bigdata-based consulting boutique and blockchain startup. Main research area includes blockchain, IS investment and strategy.

∙ The author Kun Shin Im is currently a Professor of Information Systems at School of Business, Yonsei University. He received his PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of South Carolina. His main research areas are economic impact of IT on business, digital transformation, platform business, metaverse and NFT.