A Summary of Platform Strategy in the Digital Age

New digital technologies are transforming how value is created and harnessed in modern businesses. They are empowering revolutionary business models that are upending the traditional anchors of competitive strategy. These momentous changes are also ushering in new opportunities. Nowhere are the new opportunities more evident than in the spectacular success of modern “digital natives” such as Alibaba, Amazon, Facebook and Airbnb, to name a few. These “natives” have pioneered new ways of unlocking unprecedented value from data through their digital platforms. They have also created and framed their business models around rich digital ecosystems. Similar successes are possible for traditional firms too. But it needs new strategic thinking. Traditional firms must understand the new potential of data and learn how to unlock it. They must move from their prevailing “industry” mind-sets to new “digital ecosystem” mind-sets. They should elevate their traditional product-value chain- industry centric focus onto a new data-digital platform-digital ecosystem centric mindset. That is what modern-day digital transformation entails. This paper summarizes some of the existing research on digital transformation, platform strategy and suggests some future research topics.