Future business models will take place on platform like marketplaces

Future business will be conducted more and more on platforms like marketplaces and the development of marketplaces can be observed along the evolution of web technologies. We’ve followed the whole evolution, starting with static websites providing information. The next evolution was to generate social context and vertical specialization. Matching transactions were then the next logical step, where entire marketplaces were created to bring supply and demand together. The on-demand experience grew with the effect of more marketplace use cases to the point of creating their own business models based on marketplace orchestration.

All this has been made possible by an underlying platform which enables the match of demand and supply and by doing so creating value in a specific context. Now we’re in the position that different forms of marketplaces do actually comprise a different coverage of needs to match supply and demand. And we all know the examples, where in a particular transaction we may not have the awareness of the platform behind. And there is an ultimate benefit of this platform thinking, which storing the own position and benefit from platform economics:

• Addressing specific market opportunities, often adjacent to a company’s core business – this could happen with digitized but traditional products, more intelligent digital solutions, maker communities and developer enablement
• Ecosystem orchestrator (as one potential role) looks at optimizing a wide spectrum of inter-connected services and solutions and helping individuals and organizations complete complex activities more efficiently
• Attractive economics: exploiting and monetizing higher margin „intellectual capital“ (encapsulated in software) and „relational capital“ (connection between multiple parties - representing engagement patterns) - rather than stay in the analogue world with more costly „human capital“ (human experts), „financial capital“ (money) or „physical capital“ (assets and things)

Industrial technology shifts occurred in the past sometimes with enormous impacts on economy and society, what is remarkable though and that might be a good conclusion on this blog post: it’s the speed. It requires leadership frameworks and infrastructure models importantly differing from past revolutions.

Organizational structures need to be revisited, otherwise companies cannot keep up with the demands placed on them. Mastering large-scale software delivery and data literacy will define economic benefit in our today‘s world.