Platform Strategy: How the rise of platforms enables exponential business

This afternoon I am giving the closing keynote of Day 1 at CeBIT Australia on the topic of Platform Strategy: Creating Exponential Value in a Connected World.

The slides to my keynote are below.

As usual, the slides are designed to support my keynote, not to stand alone, but there is more than usual structured content that may be useful to people who are not attending my presentation.

I believe that the concept of platforms is enormously relevant in understanding how the economy is shifting today. In many ways it brings together the key themes of my books, including knowledge-based relationships, value co-creation, living networks, internal and external social media, and crowdsourcing.

I will later share more detailed thoughts on platform thinking. For now there are two key frames I would like to distill from today’s keynote.

Platforms as a primary strategic frame
The fundamental premise of platforms is that of enabling others in value-creating interactions. It is a very different frame from traditional strategy, which looks at the organisation as the value-creating entity.

In a connected world where the majority of value is created across boundaries, platform strategy should often be the first frame for both new and existing organisations. As shown in my slides, we can now provide useful, structured frameworks to address platform strategy.

Unlimited scalability
Platforms are based on network effects, in which value increases often exponentially with increasing participation, leading to winner-take-most markets. Moreover successful platforms can usually readily expand beyond their initial ambit to access a far broader strategic space.

I am particularly interested in the concept of ‘company builder’ models, where entrepreneurs build multiple ventures in parallel. These can be thought of as platforms that enable value creation on a far broader scale, building potentially exponential value.

On both of these two fronts I am a practitioner as well as thinking about these issues, working with clients on platform strategy, and building my own company builder model with Advanced Human Technologies Group.

More on all of this soon.