plataform economy

plataforms and enablement

platforms as infrastructure and services

Platforms are layers of infrastructure and services, associated with governance systems, which enable multiple agents to participate in value creation networks for their own benefit and for the ecosystem.

Despite the similarity with software platforms, here, infrastructure and services are not limited to [computational] hardware and software. We are talking about equipment, products and services, norms and rules that support an entire value chain of [at least] one market segment.

Still in this line of broad understanding of the platform concept, governance is not limited to the business rules of a computer system, but to the rules of the value chain, its principles, leadership, etc.

Finally, the agents here are all the actors that form the value chain, from those most operational at the bottom of the chain to those who lead it, including here people who consume, who produce, who create, who negotiate, who legislate, who rule etc.

plataforms and business

platforms as markets

Platforms create networked markets where many of them cooperate with each other. Gone are the times when there were boundaries between markets. Customer oriented, the purpose of any platform is to solve problems cheaper, easier, faster and treat all agents in the network as potential producers.

For that, it is necessary to reduce conflicts of interest and to increase interactions, through intermediation, and to increase the value of interactions, helping agents to create contextual value.

As market enablers, platforms increase the value of common goods available to everyone on the network, in addition to reducing liability and the risk of systemic collapse.

plataforms and coopetition

platforms as ecosystems

A paradigm shift in the size of what we are experiencing happens every few decades. The digital transformation creates new structures of direct and indirect collaboration between the agents that form the ecosystem of the phygital world.

In practice, it is time to balance opposites instead of trying to reconcile them. Unifying around platforms cannot mean diminishing variety. It is in balanced diversity that the platform economy gains stability and, at the same time, dynamics to remain innovative and relevant.

Each component, whether consumers, producers, attractors, enablers or extenders of the ecosystem has its role, its position, in this continuous movement of collaborating while competing, in a digital network, to assign value to the platform.

It is from the multifaceted and metastable balance that digital platforms transcend analog solutions and position themselves as protagonists of the digital future not only of the business, but of its and other markets.

plataforms and components

platforms as networks

Contemporary business platforms are phygital, integrate different networks of physical artifacts [spaces and objects] + networks of digital artifacts [infrastructures and applications] + networks of people [individual and collective] and all the [network effects] resulting from this integration in ecosystems of products, services.

The physical artifacts most common in today’s large phygital platforms are governance spaces, production spaces, experimentation spaces, formation spaces, exposure spaces and the various physical objects associated with each of these spaces.

The figurative platforms were born in a context where the physical is being amplified by the digital in a kind of evolving symbiosis. On these platforms, digital artifacts can be distributed in two types: the infrastructure and the applications that run on it. Depending on the platform’s degree of maturity, the level of abstraction of these artifacts changes, for example, on large global platforms they can make their infrastructure their own [sometimes exclusive] programming language, while on emerging platforms it is possible that this infrastructure becomes based on third-party nocode platforms [other platforms in the global ecosystem].

The ability to Attract people, Retain people and Monetize from the presence of these people on the platform are the main values of phygital platforms. From this perspective, phygital platforms have found that they need different doors to attract these people and different paths to retain and monetize once they enter the platform. Each of these doors has its strategies for Attracting people, Retaining people and Monetization based on the presence of these people on the platform. Many platforms retain and monetize by crossing people who enter from one door to another, sometimes offering different products and services based on the same gateway.

The formula that really matters on these big platforms is the difference between the cost of Attracting people + the cost of Retaining people vs the ability to Monetize the [whole] platform from those people.

© 2020 – 2021 tds.company all rights reserved

This text was written by the professors Silvio Meira and André Neves.

[tds.company] is the home of strateegia, a theory of practice for strategic transformation, about which we wrote a long, illustrated sentence, which is available in pdf, at the link [http://bit.ly/TDSCsat]. Our strategic enablement work is done on a digital platform that can be tested for free at the link [http://strateegia.digital].

Photo by Kevin Martin Jose on Unsplash

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