Platforms 4 Future

How to leverage communities to unlock network effects

Through a conversation with Adam Broadway, CEO and founder of platformOS, a leading innovation platform, we explore the role and impact of communities on growth and network effects.

In our third episode of the “Platforms 4 Future” podcast, we had a conversation with Adam Broadway, CEO of platformOS (www.platformOS.com), an innovation platform to help platform founders quickly develop their platform architecture.

But we did not talk about IT infrastructure or architecture with him. No, we talked about communities, the major advantages they provide for your platform, and what are successfactors of building and running a community.

What are communities of interests & practice?

The first thing we clarified is the definition of the different types of communities:

Community of interest are the hobbyists, they’re the weekend warriors, their livelihood doesn’t depend on that community. and the community of practice are the practitioners, they’re the people who generally, they’re the guilds.

Mapping them to the different sides of a platform, we see that “communities of interest” are mainly on the consumer-side (demand-side) and the “communities of practice” are mainly on the producer-side (supply-side) of a platform.

After we clarified the definition, we talked about the different advantages for you as a platform owner.

Advantage #1: Help the supply-side better leverage your platform

Adam continues: “I think it’s really important for anybody building a marketplace to focus on the communities of practice.”

Why that? Why are the communities on the producer-side so important? Simply because those are the people who are providing the goods / services exchanged via the platform. And your role as a platform owner is to help them to flourish, and become successful. One way is to facilitate exchange of information and best practices between them. And here, a well managed community helps to provide a protected environment where those people can exchange.

Looking at some examples, Adam mentioned DevMesh. This is Intel’s community platform that was created for communities of interest and practice.

He explains: “It’s taken off in a huge way and that’s a great example of where they have both the community of interest and the community of practice. Now, of course Intel has groups on Facebook, but when it comes to those people who are interested in artificial intelligence, IOT and developing with the whole suite of Intel’s various products, DevMesh is a community now, the workflows are according to Intel’s requirements, they own all the data, and they get the feedback from their community on how to improve it and so that’s one example.”

Advantage #2: Communities are a great source for market research & product development

As you can see, there are major advantages of running the communities, not on major social media platforms like facebook. Owning the data mainly as a great source for market research and understanding the needs of your users is key for every platform. But, if you leverage a social media platform like facebook, you then risk not owning the data and not being able to analyze it.

Advantage #3: Same-Side network effects

But there is also the same-side network effect that will start to kick-in. Adam talks about his experience in building a platform called Catalyst: “And so, there began to be a marketplace within the marketplace, just for the practitioners offering products, services, and even templated solutions that they had developed, and that they then provided to other practitioners within the network.”

Do you want to learn more about communities, unlocking network effects and platform leadership advices? Check out the whole article or listen to our Platforms 4 Future podcast episode via your favorite streaming platform.

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