Platforms Where the digital economy stands up
EIT Digital Master School Data Science Master DegreeCreation and deployment of digital servicesJune 2-3 2016
Francisco Jariego@fjjariego
Platforms are the future—but not for everyone
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21699103-platforms-are-futurebut-not-everyone-emporium-strikes-back
Platforms have allowed American companies to build global digital emporiums that have come to dominate the technology industry.
— The Economist, May 2016
Where Uber and Amazon rule: welcome to the world of
the platform
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/07/facebook-uber-amazon-platform-economy
Some prominent critics even speak of “platform capitalism” – a broader transformation of how goods and services are produced, shared and delivered (…) the emergence of a new, seemingly flatter and more participatory model, whereby customers engage directly with each other. With a smartphone in their pocket, individuals can suddenly do things that previously required an array of institutions.
— The Guardian, June 2015
Platform Thinking
Platforms like YouTube and Twitter have different roles, rules, strategies, and business models than typical companies. They create completely new markets, are highly disruptive to existing ways of operating, and are, by their very nature, suitable for scaling. Understanding platform thinking is a must for entrepreneurs and businesses, especially for social entrepreneurs who want to scale their impact without making large investments.
— Sangeet Choudary
http://www.thnk.org/insights/crash-course-platform-thinking/
Data as a platform
Mary Meeker, Internet Trends 2016
Are unicorns all platforms?
Unicorns are private startup companies that have achieved a valuation of (more than) $1billion before IPO
A review of the 115 companies listed as Unicorns by CB Insights in June 2015 found that 80 of these companies —70%— are platform companies.
http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/
Uber
$62.5BXiaomi
$46.0BAirBnB
$25.5B
Spotify
$8.5B
Peter C. Evans and Annabelle Gawer, “The Rise of the Platform Enterprise: A Global Survey”, January 2016
Platform companies by region
Peter C. Evans and Annabelle Gawer, “The Rise of the Platform Enterprise: A Global Survey”, January 2016
Top 10 cities by platform headquarters
Peter C. Evans and Annabelle Gawer, “The Rise of the Platform Enterprise: A Global Survey”, January 2016
Top 10 sector rank
Number of Companies
Market Capitalization
Increasing productivity through efficient matching Improving asset utilization, the sharing economy Accelerating innovation Attracting investment from VC’s Making deep inroads into other industries… from TV to transportation, and more coming…
Raising regulatory controversy: Market dominance Tax avoidance Relation to labour markets: workers vs. contractors
Platform have a real tangible economic impact today
Peter C. Evans and Annabelle Gawer, “The Rise of the Platform Enterprise: A Global Survey”, January 2016
The “product” business model is broken
• A product is good, idea, method, information, object or service that serves a need or satisfies a want.
• After buying it, you have some exclusive ownership or access.
• iPhones and GoPros, Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, Candy Crush and The New York Times mobile app are products.
• You might pay a flat price, a SaaS fee, trade your attention for ads, get some amount of free usage or partake in in-app purchases, but the concept is the same. You buy or sign up for something and use it.
• The distinguishing aspect of a platform is the ability for others to build products and ultimately generate revenue on top of it, often in ways the platform creator never imagined.
• Platforms generate revenue by taking a cut of proceeds, and costs tend to scale in proportion to their use.
• Amazon Web Services, iOS and Android, American Express, Sony PlayStation, eBay, Facebook, Skype, Vogue magazine, Yellow Pages, YouTube, Uber, AirBnB are platforms
• Traditional cable TV companies, department stores, movie theatres, satellite radio companies, aren’t
Product versus Platform
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/28/the-platform-paradox
Platforms are not new…
I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member
— Groucho Marx
Clubs
Newspapers
Credit Cards
Uber
Cities
Industry Platform Side 1 Side 2
Media
Newspapers & Magazines Reader Advertiser
TV Network Viewer Advertiser
Web Portal Web "Surfer" Advertiser
SoftwareOperating System App. User Developer
Video Game Console Game User Developer
Payments Credit Card Cardholder Merchant
Transport Ride-Hailing Passenger Driver
Retail Amazon, Ebay, Alibaba Buyer Merchant
Why does a platform exist?
Why does a platform exist?
The fundamental goal of a platform is to enable interactions between producer and consumer, allowing them to share or exchange things without direct intervention by the platform owner
Producers can ‘plug-in’ and create on top of a platform. The consumer is often also a producer!
EU Commission: Online platform refers to an undertaking operating in two (or multi)-sided markets, which uses the internet to enable interactions between two or more distinct but interdependent groups of users so as to generate value for at least one of the groups. Certain platforms also qualify as intermediary service providers.
Annabelle Gawer: technological building blocks (which can be technologies, products, or services) that act as a foundation on top of which an array of firms, organized in a set of interdependent firms (‘‘ecosystems”) develop a set of inter-related products, technologies and services
Sangeet Choudary: A platform is a plug & play business model that allows multiple participants (producers and consumers) to connect to it, interact with each other and create and exchange value
Michael Cusumano: A platform or complement strategy differs from a product strategy in that it requires an external ecosystem to generate complementary product or service innovations and build positive feedback between the complements and the platform. The effect is much greater potential for innovation and growth than a single product-oriented firm can generate alone.
What is a Platform?
What is a Platform?
A Multi-sided platform (MSP) is an organization that creates value primarily by enabling direct interactionsbetween two (or more) distinct types of affiliatedcustomers
— Hagiou & Wright 2011
Re-SellerSide A Side B
MSP
Side A Side B
From Pipes to Platforms
Sale of goods or services
Sale of goods or services
Affiliation Affiliation
Direct Interaction
“A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ised product”
— Jeff Bezos
“A platform is a system that can be adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not possibly have contemplated…”
— Marc Andreessen
Platforms: market or technology?
The economic perspective: Platforms create value by acting as conduits between two or more groups of consumers who would not have been able to connect or transact without the platform. Platforms are two-sided or multi-sided markets
The engineering view: Platforms have a modular type of technological architecture, with interfaces (API) being fundamental for modularity to facilitate innovation. Platforms are purposefully designed technological architectures that facilitate innovation
The Platform Stack
Network / Ecosystem
Technology Infrastructure
Data
https://medium.com/art-marketing/the-platform-stack-c83f9c96e6#.a6dsfuz9x
2-sided markets
1. .Two or more different groups of customers who need each other in some way
2. Crossed network externalities between these groups (a group being attracted to the platform because of the other group's participation)
3. An intermediary (platform) facilitates the coordination more efficiently than bi-lateral relationships, minimizing transactions costs, and (partially) internalizing the externalities between groups
The interesting question is often not whether a market can be defined as two-sided—virtually all markets might be two-sided to some extent—but how important two-sided issues are in determining outcomes of interest!
Positive network effects are present when the value of a product or service increases with the increasing number of other users
Direct positive network effects apply to the same group of users (e.g. more users joining a telephone network, or a social network like Facebook). For users of those platforms, the value of using the platform grows as other participants with whom they can interact start joining.
Indirect positive network effects exist when users of one group benefit from an increased presence of users from a different group (e.g. sellers on an online marketplace benefit from a higher number of buyers).
Network effects and externalities: Bigger is Better
A customer on one side of the market will be willing to affiliate with a platform only if he or she expects enough participation from the other side.
Today’s expectations regarding the growth of a network will be an important determinant of their adoption decision
Failure to achieve “critical mass” quickly results in the implosion of the platform. Most platforms fail to take off.
Expectations: The Chicken & Egg Conundrum
The aura of inevitability is a powerful weapon when
demand-side economies of scale are strong
Time
Users
Launch
Take-off
SaturationPositive feed-back
Critical Mass
Example: Network Effects, Uber
Rochet & Tirole, “Platform competition in two-sided markets”
A firm can rationally invest in a product it intends to give away into perpetuity even in the absence of competitors.
Increased demand in a complementary premium goods market may cover the cost of investment in the free-goods market.
This strategy also takes advantage of information’s near zero marginal costproperty as it allows a firm to subsidize an arbitrarily large market at a modest fixed cost.
If you are not paying for it, you are the product!
Platforms are competing in “winner takes all” or “a few winners take all” markets:
Switching costs and lock-in. Tipping & winner takes all markets
(monopoly) Components, complements, systems Coordination & Standards Open strategies Technology adoption with multiple
equilibria …
Network Economics
Time
Marketshare (%)
100
50
0
Battlefield
Supply-side and demand-side economies of scale
combine to make positive feedback in the digital
economy especially strong
Example: How IOS, Android deliver benefits to all sides
Vision Mobile
Example: Smartphones take over
Profit Share Handsets 2007-2013Share of Shipments 2005-2013
Vision Mobile
Example: Web Browser Adoption 1996-2015
Wikipedia / Reddit
How to build a (digital) platform
It’s nearly impossible for a startup to create a platform from scratch
Most platforms emerge as the byproduct of a successful product solution
Amazon’s AWS, Facebook and iOS entered the platform business somewhat unwittingly.
Unless you’re smarter than Steve Jobs, start by solving a problem for your customer and only become a platform when you’ve become the standard in solving that Problem
How to build a (digital) platform
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/28/the-platform-paradox
Identify a Problem
Identify the Core
Interaction
Rules and Tools:
Design a way to facilitate and automate the
interaction
Scale Up:build up a
network around the interaction
Every business has a platform angle
Every business today is faced with the fundamental question that underlies Platform Thinking: How do I enable others to create value?
Entrepreneurs who start multi-sided platforms must secure enough customers on both sides
Failure to achieve “critical mass” quickly results in the implosion of the platform.
There are a number of strategies available to entrepreneurs to reach critical mass.
For example, the “zigzag” strategy involves successive accretions of customers on both sides to build up the value to both.
The relevant strategies depend on the nature of the platform:
It requires securing participation by both platform sides at launch (e.g. dating venues)
it is possible to acquire one side before approaching the other side (e.g. search engines)
it is necessary to make pre-commitments to one side to induce them to make investments (e.g. video games)
Evans: How Catalysts Ignite: The Economics of Platform-Based Start-Ups
Getting both sides of the market on board
Why did Linkedin beat Monster?
What’s so special about Medium?
How did AirBnB disrupt Craiglist?
Why do YouTube and Vimeo coexist?
Sangeet Paul Choudary, The Platform Stack
1. All teams will expose their data…2. Teams must communicate through
interfaces3. … no other form of inter-process
communication allowed4. Interfaces, without exception, must be
externalizable5. Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired
Eat your own dog-food
What comes next?
We want more jobs!
What comes next?
Retail & Social
Networks
Sharing Economy
Cyber physical
the transformation of everything else…
Smart Cities
Industry 4.0
…
The EU way: Loyauté des plateformes
DIGITAL SINGLE MARKET
INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Is Europe putting regulation above
innovation, and being too protectionist?
Platforms Here be dragons
Francisco Jariego @fjjariego
Eisenmann, T. R., Parker, G., & Van Alstyne, M. W. (2008). Opening Platforms: How, When and Why? SSRN Electronic Journal. http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1264012
Evans, David. S. (2011). “Platform economics: Essays on multi-sided businesses.”
Peter C. Evans and Annabelle Gawer (2016)“The Rise of the Platform Enterprise: A Global Survey”
Hagiu, A., & Wright, J. (2015). Multi-sided platforms. International Journal of Industrial Organization, 43, 162–174. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijindorg.2015.03.003
Rochet, J.-C., & Tirole, J. (2003). Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets. IDEI Working Papers.
Rochet, J.-C., & Tirole, J. (2004). Two-sided markets: An overview.
Rochet, J.-C., & Tirole, J. (2005). Two-Sided Markets : A Progress Report. IDEI Working Papers.
Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions - Online Platforms and the Digital Single Market Opportunities and Challenges for Europe (COM(2016)288) May 2016
Commission Staff Working Document on Online Platforms, accompanying the document "Communication on Online Platforms and the Digital Single Market" (COM(2016) 288) May 2016
Shapiro, Carl, and Hal R. Varian. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press, 1998.
Shy, Oz. The Economics of Network Industries. Cambridge, U.K. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
References
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