Digital generalist peer-to-peer rental platforms represent radical service innovation that aims to rethink consumption for the circular economy. These platforms have not become household names, unlike some others, such as ride-sharing and home-sharing platforms. To understand and resolve the challenges these platforms face and the strategies they employ, we conducted an empirical multi-case study with five generalist peer-to-peer rental platform companies in Europe. The findings of the study pinpoint tensions between the radical socio-technical innovation of these platforms and the prevailing socio-technical regime. Utilizing the principles of strategic niche management and using service-dominant logic as a theoretical lens, we create a three-level ecosystem model for contextualizing the challenges and strategies and analyze our empirical findings against it. We propose novel, service ecosystem-based niche management strategies for digital generalist peer-to-peer rental platforms based on the findings.
