The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power, Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie. HarperCollins, 2019, 320p.

By Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie. Management International, 2019

383 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Managers and entrepreneurs in the digital era must learn to live in two worlds—the conventional economy and the platform economy. Platforms that operate for business purposes usually exist at the level of an industry or ecosystem, bringing together individuals and organizations so they can innovate and interact in ways not otherwise possible. Platforms create economic value far beyond what we see in conventional companies. The Business of Platforms is an invaluable, in-depth look at platform strategy and digital innovation. Cusumano, Gawer, and Yoffie address how a small number of companies have come to exert extraordinary influence over every dimension of our personal, professional, and political lives. They explain how these new entities differ from the powerful corporations of the past. They also question whether there are limits to the market dominance and expansion of these digital juggernauts. Finally, they discuss the role governments should play in rethinking data privacy laws, antitrust, and other regulations that could reign in abuses from these powerful businesses. Their goal is to help managers and entrepreneurs build platform businesses that can stand the test of time and win their share of battles with both digital and conventional competitors. As experts who have studied and worked with these firms for some thirty years, this book is the most authoritative and timely investigation yet of the powerful economic and technological forces that make platform businesses, from Amazon and Apple to Microsoft, Facebook, and Google—all dominant players in shaping the global economy, the future of work, and the political world we now face.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cb8b9ee15da2fad9023107bf681bab16b6d8d2f4

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Citations in the corpus

Digital platforms for development: Foundations and research agenda (2021, background): “Overall, because of the involvement of NGOs and the like, combined with the primary social concern being development instead of profit making, the literature revealed a somewhat different ecosystem to that of commercial contexts such as those in the global North.”
How open is innovation? A retrospective and ideas forward (2021, positive): “…some companies already pursue data-driven busines models—especially platform companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook (as documented by, e.g., Cusumano, Gawer, and Yoffie, 2019) as well as some traditional industrial companies (as documented by, e. g., Björkdahl, 2020; Sjödin et al,…”