Talking about Platforms

In The Interaction Field, management expert and professor Erich Joachimsthaler explains that the only way to thrive in this environment is through the Interaction Field model. Companies who embrace this model generate, facilitate, and benefit from data exchanges among multiple people and groups -- from customers and stakeholders, but also from those you wouldn't expect to be in the mix, like suppliers, software developers, regulators, and even competitors.

Platform cooperatives reimagine a world where domestic workers can double their income by establishing their platform. On this internet, platforms such as Twitch, Twitter, and Roblox are owned by their streamers, users, and creators. What if small fishing communities in Mexico or farmers in Kerala had the power to determine what data they collected about their work and how they utilized that data? Platform cooperatives are not a figment of the romantic imagination, but rather a reality transforming industries today. Collectives that leverage technology offer an urgent and practical solution to shift how businesses are owned and controlled, allowing workers to make decisions together. In this book, researcher and activist Trebor Scholz explores how these new forms of business, powered by peer principles, are paving the way for a more equitable economy that benefits everyone.

"Ecosystems represent potentially the best organizational model for the future of organizations." Mark Greeven

Enterprise information systems (EIS) have been important enablers of business cross-functional processes since the 1990s. Often referred to as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, they were extended in line with electronic businesses for integration with suppliers and customers. Today, EIS architectures comprise, not only, ERP, supply chain, and customer relationship management systems, but also, business intelligence and analytics. We open the discussion piece by discussing how decentralization dynamics impact EIS and how such dynamics must be controlled but also harnessed to make future EIS more efficient and useful.

The CityScienceLab at the HafenCity University Hamburg investigates the urban challenges in the era of digitalization in cooperation with partners from civil society, politics, economy, and science. It pursues an inter and transdisciplinary perspective by linking technical issues with social and cultural developments.

We explore the intersection of platform governance and media policy and examine the impact of inter-and-intra-organizational behavior on platform governance and content moderation.

We talk about the so-called “Web3” movement that emerges as a reaction against the growing concentration of power to information in the hands of a few and instead proposes an open, trustless, and distributed iteration of the Internet that rests on visions of interoperation, decentralization, democratization, and user-controlled monetization.

A conversation about the legal challenges and opportunities of blockchain technology and platform ecosystems, with a specific focus on governance and trust.

Building identity, payments, and data exchange as infrastructure to scale solutions in agriculture, health, poverty, climate, and other pressing challenges promises to be one of the most compelling public interventions of this decade. But the work, as with the definition of it, is still emergent. We look forward to hearing from you to learn more ways to think about these important issues.

In most platform environments, the exclusive provision of premium content from leading creators (superstars) is used as a strategy to boost user participation and secure a competitive edge vis-à-vis rivals. In this article, we study the impact of superstar exclusive content provision on platform competition and complementors’ homing decisions. Two competing platforms facilitate interactions between consumers and suppliers, of which the latter are identified by the superstar and a fringe of complementors (e.g., independent developers, amateurs). When platform competition is intense, more consumers become affiliated with the platform favored by superstar exclusivity. This mechanism is self-reinforcing as it generates an entry cascade of complementors, and some complementors single home on the favored platform.

The burgeoning digital platforms literature across multiple business disciplines has primarily characterized the platform as a market or network. Although the organizing role of platform owners is well recognized, the literature lacks a coherent approach to understanding organizational governance in the platform context. Drawing on classic organizational governance theories, this paper views digital platforms as a distinct organizational form where the mechanisms of incentive and control routinely take center stage. We systematically review research on digital platforms, categorize specific governance mechanisms related to incentive and control, and map a multitude of idiosyncratic design features studied in prior research onto these mechanisms. We further develop an integrative framework to synthesize the review and to offer novel insights into the interrelations among three building blocks: value, governance, and design. Using this framework as a guide, we discuss specific directions for future research and offer several illustrative questions to help advance our knowledge about digital platforms’ governance mechanisms and design features.

Many recent technological advances (e.g. ChatGPT and search engines) are possible only because of massive amounts of user-generated data produced through user interactions with computing systems or scraped from the web (e.g. behavior logs, user-generated content, and artwork). However, data producers have little say in what data is captured, how it is used, or who it benefits. Organizations with the ability to access and process this data, e.g. OpenAI and Google, possess immense power in shaping the technology landscape. By synthesizing related literature that reconceptualizes the production of data for computing as ``data labor'', we outline opportunities for researchers, policymakers, and activists to empower data producers in their relationship with tech companies, e.g advocating for transparency about data reuse, creating feedback channels between data producers and companies, and potentially developing mechanisms to share data's revenue more broadly. In doing so, we characterize data labor with six important dimensions - legibility, end-use awareness, collaboration requirement, openness, replaceability, and livelihood overlap - based on the parallels between data labor and various other types of labor in the computing literature.

Research summary Platform ecosystems have spurred new products and services, sparked innovation, and improved economic efficiency in various industries and technology sectors. A distinctive feature of the platform architecture is its modular and interdependent system of core and complementary components bound together by design rules and an overarching value proposition. Accordingly, we conceptualize platforms as meta-organizations, or “organizations of organizations” that are less formal and less hierarchical structures than firms, and yet more closely coupled than traditional markets. To function successfully, however, platforms require coordination among multiple participants not all of whose interests are aligned. These organizational features of platforms raise many interesting and complex strategic challenges and hold implications for how platforms compete. In this paper, we discuss some of the most salient features of platform ecosystems as meta-organizations, specifically in terms of the sources of authority or power in the ecosystem, the motivation and incentives a platform creates to attract participants, and its governance and coordination structures. We then consider how papers appearing in this special issue inform us about the effects of these features on platform competition along three distinct dimensions: (a) with traditional incumbents as platforms enter and establish themselves in new markets, (b) with other platforms to secure an advantageous market position, and (c) with the different participants on the platform to share the value that has been created jointly. We close by identifying some promising directions for future research.

Enterprise resource planning upgrades can be expensive and complex—and unavoidable. A product and platform approach can manage costs and improve outcomes.

Daniel, Tommaso, and Philip talk about the upcoming season, important changes to the team (welcome, Tommaso!), and Platform Thinking.

We end season two of the Talking about Platforms Podcast by bringing on a true expert on applied network effects. Sameer Singh looks back on a long and successful track record investing in network effects-based startups. In this episode, we discuss how Sameer differentiates between networked products and platforms, how to measure network effects, and why network effects-based businesses must also start with solving a real customer's problem.

Why do we need platform business design? Today's rise of digital platforms is reshaping our economy leaving traditional business models far behind. Google, Airbnb, Facebook, Uber, and Amazon are only a few prominent examples of an unstoppable row of businesses leveraging platform dynamics. A multi-sided platform acts as a digital marketplace, where producers and consumers come together, and value is created for both parties through their interaction. Platforms create and manage external communities rather than produce and ship products or services on their own. Thus, they can leverage network effects and are able to grow at a pace that easily exceeds this of even the best-funded traditional businesses.

Abstract of the paper we discuss We investigate patterns in platform ecosystem emergence. We find that the processes of ecosystem emergence—value discovery (designing and establishing an ecosystem value proposition and individual value offerings), collective governance (regulation of participation), platform resourcing (resource acquisition for set-up and scale-up), and contextual embedding (legitimation of the ecosystem in the wider societal and competitive context)—exhibit characteristic patterns as an ecosystem establishes itself. We also find that collective governance patterns vary considerably across cases and argue that early governance decisions significantly influence subsequent evolution of an ecosystem. Furthermore, we show that although there are similarities in ecosystem emergence at the macro level (during launch, expansion, and establishment), at the micro level these processes coevolve giving rise to idiosyncratic patterns of coevolution.

Abstract Digital platforms are an omnipresent phenomenon that challenges incumbents by changing how we consume and provide digital products and services. Whereas traditional firms create value within the boundaries of a company or a supply chain, digital platforms utilize an ecosystem of autonomous agents to co-create value. Scholars from various disciplines, such as economics, technology management, and information systems have taken different perspectives on digital platform ecosystems. In this Fundamentals article, we first synthesize research on digital platforms and digital platform ecosystems to provide a definition that integrates both concepts. Second, we use this definition to explain how different digital platform ecosystems vary according to three core building blocks: (1) platform ownership, (2) value-creating mechanisms, and (3) complementor autonomy. We conclude by giving an outlook on four overarching research areas that connect the building blocks: (1) technical properties and value creation; (2) complementor interaction with the ecosystem; (3) value capture; and (4) the make-or-join decision in digital platform ecosystems.