Rebuilding Relevance: Where Platform Thinking Sparks Regeneration with the Digital Phoenix Effect

Why legacy companies must reinvent how they create value – and leverage the power of ecosystems.

“Transformation doesn’t start with what you do. It starts with where you look.”

Across boardrooms and strategy offsites, one question echoes louder than ever: how can legacy companies regenerate themselves in a platform-dominated economy? Over the past decade, digital platforms have reshaped the business landscape – from how we move (Uber) to how we learn (Coursera) to how we relax (Spotify). But the real opportunity today lies not in copying tech unicorns. It lies in how established organizations can reimagine where they create value. This is the central idea of our new book: The Digital Phoenix Effect.

Research Insight: A View from the S&P 500

In the last three years, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of all S&P 500 companies and their platform-related initiatives. We mapped almost 800 projects that claimed to involve platform dynamics. But when tested against a rigorous definition, requiring multi-sided architecture and network effects in order to trigger stellar growth at quasi-zero marginal costs, only 140 passed. This is a powerful signal and tells us two things:

1. Platform Thinking is no longer the domain of startups – it is being embraced across industries. However, legacy firms, often still unfamiliar with platform mechanisms, frequently confuse any digital service with a platform, leaving considerable room for improvement and untapped opportunities to create competitive advantage.
2. Legacy firms surprised us in how they use Platform Thinking – not only to create innovative customer-facing services but also to transform internal processes, such as R&D, operations, customer support, and HR.

To understand where this shift leads, we studied three powerful examples – three “digital phoenixes” that reinvented themselves not by chasing trends, but by rethinking the very arena of their value creation.

Siemens Xcelerator

Siemens, a titan of industrial excellence, faced an existential challenge: its legacy strengths – precision engineering and reliable machinery – risked becoming liabilities in an era dominated by agile digital-native competitors. Customers no longer wanted just superior hardware; they demanded seamlessly integrated digital solutions.

Rather than following the traditional path of costly internal expansions or cumbersome external partnerships, Siemens reimagined its future by embracing Platform Thinking. It created Xcelerator, an open innovation platform powered by APIs, allowing external developers to leverage Siemens’ advanced hardware and extensive IoT infrastructure. This strategic pivot instantly transformed idle assets – an enormous installed base, deep customer relationships, and powerful brand trust – into cornerstones of a collaborative digital ecosystem.

This bold move produced a new service offering and triggered strong network effects: the more equipment buyers joined, the greater the appeal to software developers, and vice versa. Such scalable growth was impossible via traditional methods, and certainly unreachable by any startup lacking Siemens’ immense industrial foundation.

AXA Digital Commercial Platform

AXA faced a critical challenge: climate change had rendered traditional actuarial models, built on historical data, ineffective in predicting increasingly severe natural disasters. Agile insurtech startups, leveraging real-time data, AI, and IoT, swiftly reshaped risk management, turning AXA’s deep underwriting expertise and trusted brand into potential liabilities.

Instead of adopting the costly, rigid approach of internal analytics teams or acquisitions, AXA chose Platform Thinking. It created the AXA Digital Commercial Platform (ADCP), a transactional marketplace connecting AXA’s B2B clients directly to specialized providers in climate intelligence, cybersecurity, and operational resilience, generating powerful network effects and richer predictive insights. This two-sided marketplace empowered clients to actively mitigate risks and offered providers trusted access to new customers, generating powerful network effects: more participants yielded richer data and more precise insights for everyone involved.

Internally, ADCP transformed AXA’s primary value-chain activities, particularly underwriting and claims management, by embedding dynamic, real-time intelligence into daily operations. Leveraging its unmatched idle assets – global risk data, regulatory credibility, and deep client relationships – AXA achieved operational agility and scalability beyond the reach of any startup.

Eni Open-es

Eni faced a critical challenge: mounting global pressures for stringent ESG standards threatened its ability to align thousands of suppliers – especially SMEs – with ambitious sustainability goals. Many smaller suppliers lacked the resources and expertise needed to measure, report, and enhance ESG performance, risking regulatory consequences and market competitiveness for Eni itself.

Instead of launching costly internal consulting teams or fragmented compliance programs, Eni embraced Platform Thinking, creating Open-es – a transactional marketplace linking industrial suppliers with specialized ESG service providers. Suppliers gained standardized, accessible tools to assess, certify, and improve sustainability practices, while providers accessed a qualified market at scale.

Internally, Open-es innovated Eni’s procurement, a support value-chain activity, embedding sustainability directly into compliance and supply-chain management processes. Network effects amplified the platform’s value: more participants generated richer data and better insights for the entire ecosystem. Leveraging unmatched idle assets – deep supplier relationships, procurement expertise, and trusted industry credibility – Eni rapidly scaled ESG transformation beyond what any startup could achieve.

Reframing Platform Thinking: What Legacy Firms Can Teach Us

The stories of Siemens, AXA, and Eni offer a powerful counterpoint to the startup-centered narrative around platforms. They show that legacy firms not only can do platforms – they can excel at them.

1. Legacy Companies Can Do It – And They Start with Hidden Advantages
   Incumbents possess vast underutilized assets: customer trust, embedded infrastructure, proprietary data, and operational scale. These are not obstacles – they’re advantages. The opportunity isn’t to mimic startups, but to mobilize these dormant strengths through platform logic.
2. Platforms Can Unlock These Assets to Tackle Existential Challenges
   Siemens used its installed base and industrial technology to create Xcelerator, enabling developers to build on top of its products. AXA transformed how it manages risk internally, turning insurance into a real-time, proactive service. Eni reimagined procurement, aligning suppliers to sustainability goals through Open-es. These aren’t marginal improvements – they are platform-enabled responses to systemic challenges like digital transformation, climate change, and ESG compliance. Platforms give legacy firms the scale and coordination power to act where it matters most.
3. We’ve Seen Platforms Shine at the Front-End – But Legacy Firms Can use them to Reinvent Internal processes
   Startups showed us the power of platforms for customer-facing innovation, but Siemens, AXA, and Eni highlight the untapped potential for legacy firms – both externally and internally. Siemens proved legacy firms could replicate startup agility externally: with Xcelerator, it created a new digital service ecosystem alongside its core business, attracting external developers and expanding offerings without disrupting traditional operations. AXA and Eni went further, demonstrating that platforms could revolutionize internal operations. AXA’s Digital Commercial Platform transformed primary value-chain activities – underwriting and claims management – by embedding real-time intelligence directly into processes, shifting insurance from reactive protection to proactive prevention. Eni’s Open-es leveraged a support activity – procurement – turning compliance into strategic collaboration, enhancing supplier sustainability, and redefining procurement as a strategic ESG driver. These examples reveal a deeper truth: platforms aren’t just for building new things – they’re for transforming what already exists. The real revolution is not in creating another app – it’s in using platforms to rewire the business from the inside out.

The lesson? Platform Thinking is not about chasing the future – it’s about unlocking the full value of the present.

The Digital Phoenix Effect

Understanding where to apply platform thinking, whether adjacent to the core business, within primary activities, or deep in support functions, is just one dimension of the Platform Thinking framework. Our new book, The Digital Phoenix Effect, introduces this lens in depth, showing how legacy firms chose radically different entry points to spark regeneration. But the framework doesn’t stop there.

A second, equally critical dimension emerges from our research: the five business problems that platforms can solve. These include missing or inefficient transactions, evolving customer demands, innovation bottlenecks, underutilized data, and the lack of strategic insights from data. These are not abstract themes, they are the structural challenges we’ve seen again and again in our fieldwork across industries. And they point to why platform strategies are not just an option, but increasingly a necessity for incumbents seeking to remain relevant.

The Digital Phoenix Effect is grounded in rigorous analysis. We’ve mapped hundreds of platform initiatives across the S&P 500, examined how legacy firms apply platform logic to different parts of their business, and identified the patterns that separate symbolic moves from real transformation.

But this is also a book built for action. It offers a practical, four-step process to help companies uncover and activate the latent power in their assets. It includes workshop-tested tools (developed over three years collaborating with more than 20 legacy firms) like the Platform Thinking Cards Set, and a Platform Thinking Journey GPT to challenge, stimulate, and guide teams through the journey.

This is not a manifesto for disruption. It’s a guide for intelligent regeneration. For legacy firms, the future won’t come from starting over. It will come from seeing the business differently, and building from there.

By Daniel Trabucchi and Tommaso Buganza