The rise of platforms is transforming competition. And hence, reshaping ecosystem dynamics make it crucial for any businesses to have Platform Play. Ever changing customer expectations, emergence of large-scale platforms and supportive regulatory measures constitute performance pressures that require linearly thinking companies to respond. Digital innovation makes it easy to connect everything. We are now at the stage when a paradigm shift is more than needed.
Platform economy focuses on building and facilitating an ecosystem. An ecosystem aligned to the underlying platform and powered by fast improving online technologies. This shift requires a change in the people, processes and technologies that underpin the organization. Understanding ecosystems helps to ensure that selected technology tools will be relevant and sustainable.
The main goal of this manual is to stress the rising importance of inter connectedness within business ecosystems. Emphasizing the urgency to embrace platform thinking! It has now become an essential attribute for business leadership.
We have written this manual to guide teams or individuals through our thinking of Platform Design. The goal of this manual is to enhance the understanding of platforms and ecosystems and to trigger the mind on how to start acting and become part of the Platform Play!
Our work is a synthesis of the thoughts of a great platform thinker Sangeet Choudary, the Platform Design Toolkit - created by Simone Ciccero and his PDT team and the Platform Innovation Kit created by Matthias Walter and his team. We feel that we have created additional value by consolidating all this work into a natural and pragmatic flow, extending it with tools to really grasp all the key aspects of Platform design.