Platform Economy Strategy

Trends & Key Capabilities in the Platform Economy for 2022

Learn more about key trends to scale your platform venture in 2022

In the last two years we witnessed a massive acceleration of the platform economy turbo charged by the Corona pandemic. More and more people and businesses turned to the digital world and transformed their lives and business model. Especially platforms & marketplaces where the biggest winners. But what comes next? Which trends can we see now and will hold on for the next years? What key capabilities you have to learn and master to benefit from the trends? Read more in our recent post.

Key takeaways:

• The Platform Value Stack is a tool to make fundamental strategic decisions as a platform venture
• Ecosystems & the rise of the Metaverse
• Net Positive Platforms as a new platform business narrative
• Marketplace enabled SaaS for B2B businesses
• Web3 regains momentum

The Platform Value Stack

As platform venture builders we worked a lot with venture teams around the world. Very often we were asked if there is more value a platform can provide beyond bringing supply and demand together. To answer this question we went into a deeper analysis of over 400 platforms and we identified four major value layers — which we called the “Platform Value Stack”.

This stack of not just explains how platforms provide value, but also helps teams to make better strategic decisions. Where should we focus on next? How can we better monetize our business? How can we align a marketplace and software business? etc.

Quickly the Platform Value Stack became one of our core strategy tools and is also available as an Advanced Tool as part of the Platform Innovation Kit toolset.

To identify trends and to predict the future of platforms, we are using the Platform Value Stack (PVS) as well and that’s why we started our blog post to explain the PVS.

Ecosystem, Super Apps and the rise of the Metaverse

Some years we already predicted a new inflection point of business models — beyond platforms. Currently there is no established name out there. Some call them “Business Ecosystems”, “Experienced Economy” and others metaverse.

What all of them have in common are two things

• Merge of physical and digital world
• Combining more and more services into a joined experience

What does this mean? Looking at the PVS it is a “T”-shaped trend.

First, it combines more and more services under one umbrella — all of them belonging to one “ecosystem”. It’s the blurring of industry boundaries. For example: In the future we talk about “Mobility” and “Healthcare” ecosystems. Those ecosystems are a combination of multiple services along the customer journey. E.g. when you talk about “mobility” you currently use 5–10 apps on your mobile phone just to go from A to B. Including planning, organizing, booking, traveling, socializing, work, and many more. But customers want convenience and so called “Super Apps” are starting to bring those different activities together. This is reflected by the roof of the “T”.

The vertical line of the “T” is reflected by the merge of the physical and digital world. Currently most of the platforms act as marketplaces to virtually bring supply and demand together. But really successful platforms start to build capabilities on the other layers of the PVS too. This unlocks great defensibility and enormous differentiation compared to the competitors. For example our venture foodnewcomer builds a new B2B platform “Cenfood”. This includes building a logistics (physical world) solution for all the food startups out there to get ordered and delivered by retails food stores. Pioneers of that trends is Amazon and this model is now more and more adapted by platform ventures around the world.

Net Positive Platforms

Unfortunately the biggest challenge of our mankind is not Covid but climate change. And we are still too slow to transform our lives and businesses into more sustainable ones. But this can be changed.

We at the Platform Innovation Kit developed the PIK 5.0 exactly with that in mind to provide people around the globe a toolset to design better platform businesses — sustainability by design.

Those sustainable platforms are the next big trend and we call them “Net Positive Platforms” as they provide a triple bottom line benefit — for people (society), for the planet and for profit.

It’s not just circular economy, this is one part. But NPP are more. Every part of their business model helps to make the world a better place. Not just CO2 neutral, but providing a positive impact.

The first step is that we needed to change our definition of a platform business to reflect on that.

Marketplace enabled SaaS

Let’s go into the B2B space. It very often lacks behind the trends in B2C. Therefore you can easily identify what happened in the last years in B2C and make a transfer into the B2B world.

What we currently witness here is the great combination of the marketplace model with the Software business model (cloud business). A good example here is the textexchange platform. On the “engagement” layer of the PVS they provide a marketplace to find and book an industrial test laboratory for your product tests. And on the “Intelligence” layer they provide a SaaS solution for product development companies to manage & organize all the product tests.

I like this example as it clearly show how to combine multiple layers and provide additional value to the customers. And, to extend your business model and think beyond marketplaces.

Web3 regains momentum

After a hot start with Bitcoin about 5 years ago, blockchain and Distributed Ledger technologies start to regain momentum. Especially NFTs and Decentralized Finance become more and more popular as next use cases of DLT. For us it is still early tech and early business but it underlines the prediction of Gartner that DLT becomes popular again in 2025. We are going through the Slope of Englightment.

NFTs are for us a bit like playground, but DeFi could become a win or break case. If one or two businesses really can show a big advantage compared to traditional model and convince not only early adopters to test and use the service, then this could become a role model for other cases .

In our opinion the key here is ease of use and transparency. As decentralization makes things more complex, the key to convince people to trust into the new model is to provide transparency make it absolutely easy to understand.

This post was published first at the Platform Innovation Kit blog and based on our experience in building platform ventures at the fastbreak.one.

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