Platform Thinking and Platform Businesses
Today’s tech giants – Amazon, Microsoft, through its Azure and Xbox services, Apple through its App Store, Uber, AirBnb - operate on a platform-based business model. A well-implemented platform business increases the value delivered to customers while offering a variety of integrated products and services.
Now, more companies are adopting a platform-based approach to business to keep pace with innovation and competitors that operate like tech companies. In the pandemic era and its aftermath, traditional companies have realized that they need to start behaving like digital natives, and this behavioural transformation is essential, not just to thrive, but survive.
Companies are also applying “platform thinking”—an approach that focuses on increasing flexibility and services while providing more value to customers—to transform their business. In fact, organizations can use platform thinking to restructure their tech foundations or optimize their operating model. Yet most attempts at a platform transformation1 fail to reach their full potential. In large part this is because many companies don’t take a strategic and comprehensive view of how building, integrating, or partnering with a platform will affect the business and its technology.