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The world’s most valuable companies — Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon — are platform businesses. About two-thirds of “unicorns” and other startups are platform businesses. And platform systems exist in social media (Facebook), video games (Nintendo), payments (PayPal), and more.
“We really do live in a platform world, so it’s worth trying to understand this at a deeper level, whether or not you’re an entrepreneur or a manager or even a user,” said MIT Sloan professor Michael Cusumano, during a new webinar sponsored by the System Design & Management program at MIT.
Cusumano is an expert in strategy, product development, and entrepreneurship. He is the co-author of the book “The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power.”
Cusumano’s online lecture highlights various chapters of the book, including how to build a platform business — and why your market might not be right for one — the characteristics of a winning platform, what he sees in the future for platforms, and a phenomenon he and his co-authors coined “platformania.”
“Sometimes people think that if you ‘platformize’ a particular business, you have to make money. You have that potential exponential growth in front of you. And in some ways it’s a winner’s curse,” Cusumano said. “Let’s think about Uber. They’ve actually won 70% of the U.S. market but what have they won? They’ve won the right to lose billions of dollars a year because of the way they’re structured.”
For more about Uber’s platform woes, which companies are doing it right, and other platform strategy insight, watch the complete lecture below.
