The lean core in digital platforms

2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2015

Platform research has expanded from management of technology domains towards the service of a business. Any kind of venue -physical or virtualenabling a one-sided, two-sided or multi-sided market can be thought of as a platform. Digital platforms compete against each other and some become successful while others fade away. Platform cannot be managed in a goal-oriented fashion because the number of actors and relationships between them increases beyond the ability of what the platform owner can handle. However, a platform can be orchestrated by designing and facilitating processes taking place among participants. In this conceptual paper, we review the literature on platforms and participant roles. We present four platform categories and three platform orchestration modes. In conclusion, we suggest that winning platform requires simultaneous orchestration of efficiency, development and innovation in order to attract and lock-in participants, facilitate transactions, and create novel offerings.

Becoming A Platform In Europe: On the Governance of the Collaborative Economy, 2021

This chapter first introduces the potential for creating alternative business models in the digital collaborative economy, then presents how annotated portfolios can be used to enable a founder’s wishes and desires for their emerging business to be articulated as a business model design. The chapter then presents two case studies of emergent micro-businesses who wish to use the platform economy to create a networked business model for more than financial benefit. Using annotated portfolio techniques as a framework to analyse ethnographic data gathered from engagement with each founder then enables their wishes and desires to be articulated as business models designs, rooted in their knowledge and experience in a particular domain. The common factors and power-balances in the case study business model designs are then abstracted as the Open Source Platform Federation business model

GfK Marketing Intelligence Review

The driving force behind our internet economy is demand-side economies of scale, also known as network effects. These arise when users create value for other users and are enhanced by technologies that create efficiencies in social networking. While resource control and supply side efficiency used to be key success factors in the past, building platforms, orchestrating networks and managing relationships determine success in an increasingly digital world. Successful platforms seek to maximize the overall value of the whole system in a circular, revolving and feedback-driven process. By attracting more platform participants they are able to offer a higher value. The larger the network, the better the matches between supply and demand and the richer the data that can be used to find matches. Successful platforms put companies that use traditional business models at risk. Many companies are still highly competitive, but when platforms enter the same marketplace, the platforms usually w...

Journal of Management, 2020

Over the past three decades, platform competition-the competition between firms that facilitate transactions and govern interactions between two or more distinct user groups who are connected via an indirect network-has attracted significant interest from the fields of management and organizations, information systems, economics, and marketing. Despite common interests in research questions, methodologies, and empirical contexts by scholars from across these fields, the literature has developed mostly in isolated fashion. This article offers a systematic and interdisciplinary review of the literature on platform competition by analyzing a sample of 333 articles published between 1985 and 2019. The review contributes by (a) documenting how the literature on platform competition has evolved; (b) outlining four themes of shared scholarly interest, including how network effects generate "winner-takes-all" dynamics that influence strategies, such as pricing and quality; how network externalities and platform strategy interact with corporate-level decisions, such as vertical integration or diversification into complementary goods; how heterogeneity in the platform and its users influences platform dynamics; and how the platform "hub" orchestrates value creation and capture in the overall ecosystem; and (c) highlighting several areas for future research. The review aims to facilitate a broader understanding of the platform competition research that helps to advance our knowledge of how platforms compete to create and capture value.

2020

Despite an abundant literature on platforms, there have been surprisingly few quantitative studies on their adoption by established firms and their impact on performance. The unspoken assumption is that platforms increase companies’ performance. This paper uses a global, cross-industry, sample of over 1300 firms to show that, while it seems adopting platform strategies is positively associated with firm performance, the effect is confounded by (1) the digital maturity of firms and (2) their ecosystem strategy. Our results refine our understanding of platform strategy’s value by uncovering the importance of shifting to ecosystem approaches involving value co-creation. They suggest that success is not about the adoption of any platform technology, but rather about seizing integration opportunities brought by its underlying ecosystem.

Long Range Planning, 2019

In recent decades, multi-sided platform business models have become an important avenue for value creation and capture, but the phenomenon itself remains under-theorized. We address this gap and present new, empirically-driven insights into how platform business models evolve in a context of fierce competition. Through a longitudinal, qualitative study of twelve multi-sided platforms that operate under challenging industry conditions, we discover that success in platform battles can plausibly be explained by a combination of complexity in the business model design, and the simultaneous use of innovation and imitation to create highly intricate systems of activities. We further discuss how our findings open several new avenues for future platform research.

Platforms

The rise of the platform is one of the three iconic events of the “digital revolution” [...]

Americas Conference on Information Systems, 2020

Platform envelopment describes a competitive move whereby a digital platform enters an adjacent market. On one hand, it might enable to dethrone an established platform. On the other hand, it might give rise to the creation of platform conglomerates, which increases the concentration of private power. Therefore, platform envelopment has recently attracted significant attention from regulators and scholars. However, the traditional view of platform envelopment does not consider recent platform envelopment practices observed in research and practice. In this study, we aim to determine and structure the complexity of platform envelopment. We investigated 20 cases and developed a taxonomy of platform envelopment. We further encoded these cases into the comprehensive taxonomy and derived platform envelopment patterns and particularities. Our work contributes to research by establishing a foundation for the conceptual understanding of platform envelopment. Regulators can use this taxonomy to classify platform envelopment cases and determine potentially anti-competitive conduct.

SSRN Electronic Journal

This article provides an encyclopedic survey of the platform strategy literature and is organized around launch strategies, governance, and competition. A platform strategy is the mobilization of a networked business platform to expand into and operate in a given market. A business platform, in turn, is a nexus of rules and infrastructure that facilitate interactions among network users. A platform may also be viewed as a published standard, together with a governance model, that facilitates third party participation. Platforms provide building blocks that serve as the foundation for complementary products and services. They also match buyers with suppliers, who transact directly with each other using system resources and are generally subject to network effects. Examples include operating systems, game consoles, payment systems, ride sharing platforms, smart grids, healthcare networks, and social networks.

The Covid19-pandemic has accelerated processes in which digital platforms, privileged by their critical size, become central instances of urban life. While most scholars associate platform urbanism with transnational platform corporations, such as Amazon or Facebook, local non-corporate platforms unexpectedly persist despite lacking critical size. This article analyzes processes through which non-corporate platforms are created, maintained, disseminated, and locally implemented; given this type of platform's absence of critical size. We explain the persistence of local non-corporate platforms by drawing on the concept of embeddedness. Embeddedness accounts for non-market-based, i.e. socially and culturally influenced behavior, that shapes economic interactions. We distinguish between network embeddedness, in which organizations maintain permanent and exclusive relationships with one another, and local embeddedness, which combines Hess' (2004) notions of societal embeddedness and territorial embeddedness. This article is empirically grounded on an analysis of two most different ways of creating and maintaining, disseminating, and locally implementing non-corporate platforms: Platform cooperativism and free/libre open-source software-based platforms (FLOSS-based platforms). Two empirical case studies of collaboratively governed Western-European non-corporate platforms, Gebiedonline and Decidim, respectively inform the analysis of platform cooperativism and FLOSS-based platforms. Gebiedonline is a platform cooperative through which neighborhood and theme-specific platforms are created. Decidim is a FLOSS-based platform that is mainly used for civic and political participation processes. We find that governments and civil society stakeholders create non-corporate platform technology by disentangling processes related to the creation, maintenance, and dissemination of platform technology from platform implementation processes. Following platform creation, platform maintenance is embedded in a network. Non-corporate platforms pool cost-intensive technology maintenance, while platform implementation necessarily takes place in a locally embedded manner.