Today we are still caught up in the validation and relevance of managing a business through platform thinking by making the business case of its value and impact. We should not be; it is time for you to hop onto the train.

The ability to present a compelling business case for the use and application of platforms is overwhelming. I think I have well over 100 plus arguments for their use, value, impact and application.

For me, platforms are needed as we face a very different economic landscape.

We need to choose where to focus in the future, where to concentrate our resources and attempt to bridge the fragmentation that is occurring. The world of collaboration, where we can find partners to share and reinforce what we do, is leading to new dynamics of combining.

Platforms are more viable and relevant.

Platforms allow you the opportunity to innovate in very different ways. They can add value through collaborations that can add more to the internal efficiency options through learning and sharing. Platforms help manage the difficulties of transitions we are all undergoing and change how we see the world through a broader collaborative set of lenses.

We are all being forced to make new Strategic Choices

As we look at where platforms fit within our business, we make strategic choices- are we looking for performance improvements, leveraging greater growth, tapping into a more distributed innovation capability or simply shaping new value strategies?

Today platforms are a key essential layer of infrastructure that scales participation differently.

They provide different options to improve performance and grow a new footprint in markets, products, and collaborations. Platforms can leverage assets and external capabilities you do not need to own or build; they provide fresh options to innovate, capture different and new value in insights and diversity of thinking, and allow for a higher pursuit of learning advantage.

We must consider the value of the combined effect of ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios.

We can explore and exploit so much platform potential that fits with each individual company’s needs.

There are so many key questions to ask, to seek clarity too and how they can be positioned to reduce barriers to entry, commercialization and learning.

As we live in an unevenly distributed world, platforms can provide a better levelling effect, enable a way to thrive in a connected world and help offset eroding barriers we are all facing.

Let’s take FIVE underappreciated value points of business platforms.

1. Platforms are the new operation glue between end users, business developers, institutions, and manufacturing points. The ability to deploy digital software on machines enables the connecting, exchanging and talking to each other and managing a very different supply chain. Platforms are becoming the essential key layering point of infrastructure and operational management to orchestrate this through. They build out different assets, leverage the existing and optimise the potential within the existing ones to deliver a highly connected world to operate and manage within.

2. Platforms allow you to explore and experiment. Through the power of digitalization, you can re-imagine, capture, share and build from your imagination through a virtual world into the real world of realization. You have through platforms the process of honing discovery and collaboration, validating and extracting different designs, concepts or improvements on what you have

3 . Today, everything we build needs to be constantly reshaped, built upon in added ways, reshaped again and continually challenged and changed. We are in the world of circular design, and platforms rapidly become the exchange point for informing and transforming. Platforms are becoming the new flow centres that allow constant motion and offer disproportional potential, where numerous small moves can and do offer big things. It is how you influence this new set of connected dynamics that will determine

4. Platforms are the mechanism to resolve scale, broaden out the scope and enable a higher speed.  Collaboration and networks working through good business platforms can reduce barriers to entry by achieving access to technology advancements, having accessible tools and added infrastructure and enabling a more liberalization of one entity’s constraints in access to resources, learning and gaining from others.  In having available different financing options, scaling through 3rd parties and new avenues to talent and customers, different communities and sharing different and new practices all have a real combination effect.

5. Growing your business through Asymmetric Business thinking. What is your core? What will grow it in highly complementary ways? How can you cross traditional industries by leveraging what you have, combining it with technology and offering a higher value of what your core asset provides? Here we are dealing with the economics of compliments that depend on or require using another product.

So, where does Asymmetric thinking gain by being applied through platform thinking? Platforms provide you with new business model options.

Let me expand on this further as the Asymmetric Business Model opportunity requires a platform approach.

Google and Facebook are attention-based models that discover feed and generate the revenue that business pays through their portfolio of Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook. Google has a search engine for users to find anything, and businesses and publishers gain keywords to build their content around. If you take the creation of software app development drives the demand for core products, home printers depend on ink cartridges, so they each can complement and reinforce.

The economics of compliments you find on a platform will allow you to diversify, connect and grow your business.  A digital platform offers software applications, access to sophisticated tools, technology, expertise, and learning. It builds out (your) functionality and brings different levels of flexibility that can sit on top of what you have already achieved.

I have taken five different aspects of platforms here.

The combination effect of what a business platform can achieve for you is actually endless in its applications. As I mentioned earlier, I think I have well over 100 plus arguments for their use, value, impact, combination and application that can be explored, adapted and combined.

Platforms provide you with new business model options that allow you to move across different industrial sectors that were not possible without all the economics of complementaries.

Ecosystems and Platforms are the new collaborative business need.

By applying different platform business thinking, you can consider commoditising different aspects of your business value to strengthen your core assets in new value-added ways. Most importantly, you have the (equal) chance of bundling complementaries with your core from software and digital offerings and combining AI & Human intelligence to effectively compete and differentiate yourself with leverage that gives added value to your customers..

For instance, you can own and control less but share and partner more as you shift from a given asset into a collective intelligent one, leveraging all the essential parts that having access to a technology platform can provide.

Platforms are about organizing and resolving complex structures, they offer a new network business model that needs to be deployed to meet a new economic landscape. They can be a fundamental building block to finding new ways of business value creation, offering that base to a new model of collaboration and competition.

I have outlined a case for change in a recent article, “thinking out the evolution of platforms and ecosystems.” if you have the opportunity and time

I would argue platforms are your future business journey.

They are highly relevant for growth and diversification and offer a sustainable pathway. You build more dynamic capabilities to sense and seize opportunities quicker in your highly connected world.