Responsible innovation and digital platforms: The case of online food delivery

Résumé 0

Online Food Delivery (OFD) has evolved with the fast diffusion of digital platforms. But these innovations have thrived at the expense of riders delivering food orders. Riders’ risks increase because of irresponsible behaviours in the OFD ecosystem. We seek to identify sources of irresponsibility in OFD ecosystems, which adopted OFD innovations (mobile apps). We argue that these sources are distributed across actors and span across innovation adoption phases. We construct a grid to identify these sources at each adoption phase, and apply it using data collected in France during the Covid pandemic, when riders’ risks soared. Our first result enables us to fill an important gap in the literature, by providing a grid to analyse sources of irresponsibility in an OFD ecosystem. Our second result identifies these sources in the French OFD ecosystem, and enables us to provide an improved grid and to formulate managerial recommendations.JEL Codes: M14, O39