Platform Thinking: reducing friction from ancient Rome to AI

Transcript

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to our weekly LinkedIn live session, celebrating the brightest new voices in the world of management thinking. In January, we announced the Thinkers50 Radar List for 2024, 30 exciting rising stars in management thinking, and we’ll be hearing from two of them today. This year’s Radar List is brought to you in partnership with Deloitte.

A key topic is making workplaces wholly inclusive and healthy for everyone. Another is sustainability. As you might expect, AI and all things digital loom large, including platforms, which we’ll be talking about today. We like to make these sessions as interactive as possible, so please do let us know where you are joining us from and put your questions in the chat or comments box. Our guests today are Daniel Trabucci and Tommaso Buganza. Daniel is senior assistant professor and Tommaso full professor of leadership and innovation at the School of Management, Politecnico di Milano.

Daniel also serves as a senior researcher in the Leading Lab, the Laboratory for Leadership Design and Innovation, which was co-founded by Tommaso. Daniel and Tommaso are the authors of the 2023 book Platform Thinking, Read the Past, Write The Future, are the creators of the Platform Thinking Matrix, which summarizes the strategies for fostering innovation through platforms, and they’re also the creators of the Platform Thinking Business Model Canvas. Daniel and Tommaso are also joint founders of SYMPlatform, a yearly international conference on digital platforms that aims to match scholars and practitioners. They’re co-founders and scientific directors of the Platform Thinking Hub, a community of innovation leaders focusing on platforms. Daniel, Tommaso, welcome. You’re very busy.

Daniel Trabucci:

And we use the word platform thinking quite often. Hi Des, hi everyone.

Tommaso Buganza:

Hi.

Des Dearlove:

Welcome and congratulations on The Thinkers50 Radar recognition. It’s great to have both of you on. As you say, you use the word platform thinking a lot. I think it’s one of those words, isn’t it, that’s very much in the ether. People are talking about platforms a lot, but I think it’s also one of those words that means different things to different people. So perhaps we could just start with a pithy definition. What do you mean when you talk about platforms and platform thinking?

Daniel Trabucci:

Well Des, you actually started off with the question that we like the most. We probably spend a lot of time in our daily lives trying to define platforms and to explain to people what we mean about platforms. The words are actually used by human beings to align themselves quite quickly and so we can easily say that the word platform is broken, it’s not working anymore. You enter in different rooms, you enter in different companies, you enter in different fields and the word platform does have different meanings: mind the gap between the train and the platform; the platform business model; the technological platform. And the more the digital revolution goes on, the more we tend to call ‘platform’ anything that is digital. And this is kind of a pity because if we call so many different things platforms, we end up not actually getting the essence of what is making them different from something else.

So usually we start from defining what that something else is, and that something else to us is the linear value chain. So thinking back to Michael Porter’s work with the value chain, we are used to thinking that there is one dominant business model, and still there is, that put in place suppliers, giving you some kind of work in progress, raw materials, you add your value there and you sell it to your customers, whether it’s B2C or B2B. Well, when we talk about platform thinking or more specifically about the different typologies of platforms, we refer to the business models that are not based on this linear transaction.

In a first approximation, we can say that anytime the value creation process is not that linear, we are in a platform. Usually we look for two main characteristics, multiple customers and indirect cross-side network externalities; very briefly, Airbnb. It has clearly two customers, the travelers and the host. And the more travelers you have there, the more the platform is going to be interesting for the host and vice versa. So we do take care of all those initiatives, those services, those companies that do have these characteristics. So multiple customers that are generating value together along with a platform provider. And platform thinking, to us, is the way to think in this new model that is all around us.

Des Dearlove:

So tell me, you use the example of Airbnb. Give me a couple of other examples of platforms. I’m sure that the concept is familiar probably to most people listening, but let’s just flesh it out a little bit, could you?

Tommaso Buganza:

Yes, of course we can consider, at least we should consider that there are two main architectures that we can refer to when we think about platforms. The first is what is normally called the transactional platform. And so Airbnb is an example, but you got in the same family Uber, you got Amazon, you got eBay, you got Spotify. So all of these platforms, what they basically do, they allow some kind of transaction between two different customers. So you got travelers on one side and a host on the other side, you got somebody wanting a ride on one side and you’ve got drivers on the other side. It’s always the same story. What they do, they actually reduce the friction that you’ve got in the market. These people are looking for each other and they enable or make it simple to have a transaction and the way they’ve got to capture the value is to take a small part of this transaction.

But if we consider what Daniel said before, we call a platform every kind of business model that is based on at least two different customers and they need to coexist, so they’re somehow connected by this indirect network externalities, which brings us to another family of platforms like for example the social networks or Google. Google, I’m thinking about the search engine in this case. So if you think about Google as a search engine, you do not have this kind of a transaction. So you still have two customers, you’ve got us searching with Google and you’ve got the advertiser. So somebody who is paying to basically have advertising spaces on Google or to be put on the top of the list in their search and so on. Again, we’ve got two customers here, can they exist without coexisting? Basically the answer is no because if you look at me using Google, I really don’t care about the advertisers, but actually they are paying for what I’m having, so I want to have it for free.

And if you take the advertisers out of the equation, the system is not working. On the other side, the advertisers are very interested in how many users you’ve got on my side. So again, you’ve got two customers and you’ve got a sort of interaction between them. They create value together even though there’s not a transaction. So we call this second type of platforms, orthogonal platforms just to make a difference between those enabling transactions and those which are not. And then as you can imagine, there are many, many other subdivisions and different strategies and ways to make it happen. But this is just to give you a very fast answer to your question. So these are the companies we are talking about.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, so orthogonal, which isn’t a word that we use, I don’t use, every day, but that’s kind of at right angles. It’s where things intersect in a sort of perpendicular way rather than straightforward. Okay, all right, I’m with it now. You’ve been researching this area, platforms for more than a decade now. So how has the conversation, the story about platforms, how has that changed? How would you characterize where we were probably say 10 years ago, when the word platform probably wasn’t quite so familiar and people wouldn’t have been using it all the time, to where we are now? How has the story evolved?

Daniel Trabucci:

Well, I could say, we can use this question to actually tell you something more about how we started working together. 10 years ago. I entered into this building. 12 years ago, Tommaso was in New York City and he was starting to get in touch with a lot of digital services that I can say he fell in love with and that was my master thesis. So I started working on these digital services. Back then they were not called platforms, you’re right, Des. Platforms back then was mainly related to technological infrastructure, to another type that are innovation platforms, like Windows or iOS. And in those years, Airbnb and Uber were kind of popping up. The kind of thing that was integral to Tommaso and myself as a student was the fact that those companies were offering services for free. And this is strange, how can a business model be built around something that has not a clear revenue stream? And there was not a connection between those digital services and the platform world.

And actually, we read a paper by Marshall Van Alstyne and Geoff Parker that I guess you know very, very well-

Des Dearlove:

I know Marshall very well. And Geoff!

Daniel Trabucci:

And in 2005, they wrote this paper on two-sided markets that was actually trying to answer this question: how is it possible to give away a product for free? And they were studying basically what we call transactional platforms at large. We saw in that moment that actually these services that were for free to an end user were actually capturing value through the presence of another customer, your orthogonal player that Tommaso was talking about, not through advertisement but by selling data to these guys. And again, the mechanism is the same. The more people generate data, the more those data are interesting. We spent five years basically studying platforms at large: orthogonal platforms, transactional platforms … mainly startups coming from the digital world, so digital native, usually based in Silicon Valley or anyhow in the States.

When you mention our titles, Tommaso is professor of leadership and innovation. I’m actually a professor of platform thinking, although I’ve been teaching leadership and innovation as well. And we come from innovation management, we come from established firms trying to change what they are doing, remaining relevant in a world that is changing. And five years ago, more or less, we tried to cross the two worlds. We wondered what if we could take what we learn from looking at platforms and helping established firms, not in becoming a platform but in fostering innovation through those logics. So possibly remaining a linear value chain but adding services, new initiatives, new layers … whatever … digital business transformation initiatives is part by platform mechanisms, and that’s what we mean with platform thinking.

So platform thinking does not necessarily mean to create a platform-based startup. It actually means to learn from those companies and getting the chance to use these new models that are literally all around us but still not so discussed and not so used in executive offices, in established firms. And that was the idea of platform thinking, learning from these new companies – which were new at this point – and trying to bring those messages into the daily business.

Tommaso Buganza:

Well, if I may just add a thing because in answering your question, what changed in the last years, the magic that this kind of business model is enabling is that you can grow up very fast, you can scale up very fast without having the cost growing up at the same pace, so at the same speed. This is the interesting thing. So in a certain way, it’s not surprising that many startups try to create a platform, and that is logical because if you are a startup and you want to start competing against let’s say Hilton, so the kind of investment you should do in terms of buildings, in terms of architects, in terms of services, it’s huge. So there’s no way you can really do that. There’s a big, big barrier that you cannot go through. And so that’s the reason why many startups use platforms, but at the end, the mechanism can be used by companies as well, which are not platforms.

And what we are seeing now, it seems to be one of the most interesting things we observed outside in the world in the last year and a half, is that many established companies, very well known, established companies, they are creating platforms which does not mean that they are no more, as Daniel said, it doesn’t mean that they are no more value chain-based, but they are adding platforms on top of them. Examples are huge examples. One very interesting one is  John Deere, for example. So they still do tractors but they have got this platform for data exchanges. Airbus is doing the same. So we were curious about this and more or less one year ago we went to look at all the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500, and we took out from the list those which are basically native platforms. So we took out Amazon, we took out Google and these players, but still we had at the end more than 480 companies, which were very industrial companies.

So you got Walmart inside, you got General Motors inside, you got Pfizer inside, so these kinds of players. And we started to look for some signals of platformization in what they do, and the result that we obtained was incredible. So up to 92% of the Standard & Poor’s 500 companies are working, somehow, some innovation that is connected to a platform, and this number is incredibly huge. Then being sincere, we analyzed many of them and we discovered that in some cases they still call a platform something that is just a digital service. So you don’t really have two customers, it’s not very simple to scale it up and so on. But still, you’ve got a large majority of companies, established companies developing some kind of platform approach in what they do. And this is somehow telling us that this thing is big. We love startups, we love digital services, but we are talking about something that probably has got a magnitude that is way higher, bigger than just what we observed in the first 10 years.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, well we’re joined by people from, well, Stoke in the UK and Sussex in the UK. We’ve got people from Boston, Mexico, Zurich, Paris, the Philadelphia suburbs. I can see Montreal, I can see Puerto Rico, I can see Bergen, Norway. So we’ve got a very global audience. I’m going to ask some of the questions that are starting to come in. So please do put your questions because the guys I’m sure would be really interested to hear and answer your questions. But before we go, I’m going to take you backwards a little bit. Obviously mostly you were talking about digital services which are being called platforms and mostly we are talking here about digital platforms, but have there always been platforms? Is this a brand new thing or is it … you know, when you think of traditional marketplaces, are they platforms or are they not platforms?

Daniel Trabucci:

We like to say that the three typologies that we mentioned, and I will leave to Tommaso the last one because he is the only one that can properly present that case, as it has a good story behind it. We talk about transactional platforms, talk about Amazon, talk about booking.com, talk about Airbnb, but the reality is that the idea of the transactional platform was born in Persia 3000 years before the birth of Christ. And that’s the market; the market that many of our towns still have and the business model is the same. So the merchant is actually paying to have a space there. 

And the same with the platform where we call the client as a target: the advertisement base … it was at the end of the 19th century in France, when La Presse for the first time started selling advertising spaces. So yeah, platforms are not new. Digital technologies gave a boost to it. But I think the coolest one is what Tommaso can share with you.

Tommaso Buganza:

Talking about digital technologies, typically what we say is that they are not triggering anything, they are acting as a catalyst. So in a chemical reaction, a catalyst is accelerating the reaction. The reaction was there anyway, but you got it accelerated a lot. So if you got a physical market in the streets, how many people can you have? Can have thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands but no more. If you do it on the internet, you are Amazon, you got billions. So the mechanism is already there. But given that it is based on networks … on quantity, the value created at the end is huge. And there’s this case that it took us a little bit to understand, but the case in which you create a service not to target your users with advertising but actually to extract data, as we said before, and use the data.

So this thing started at least 2000 years ago in Rome. You see Rome was a huge city, at a certain point there were more than 1.5 million people living in Rome and they didn’t have a proper system for bathrooms and so on. So the problem was that people basically were doing what they had to do in the middle of a street and there was a problem. So you can imagine the numbers and also when it’s hot in Rome, it can be very annoying. So there was an emperor who was called Vespasiano. And he created the first public bathroom so people could go there and instead of going in the street and pee in the street, they could do it in the public bathroom. How do you pay for this thing? So there’s a cost for it. Romans were very, very fixed with cost. So you need to cover the cost and there was no way to ask people to pay to go to the bathroom because they were accustomed to doing it in the street.

Basically what they discovered was that urine was very useful for the production of leather and leather was incredibly important in the Rome economy. So that was the idea. So I give something to you for free because in using it, you’re giving something back to me – that you don’t really care about. But if I take all of these things, data in one case or urine in the other, and I bring it to somebody else, somebody else is more than willing to pay me for that.

The mechanism has been there since forever, so the abilities to understand how to evolve it, how to make it grow and so on. Let me add one other thing. There are many businesses out there that are what we call natural platforms and they just don’t know it. So think about an airport. An airport is basically a platform. You are serving the travelers and given that they are there, somebody like Gucci, let’s say, is more than willing to pay to have a space because they will increase their revenues according to the number of people that you’re serving in your airport.

This is basically exactly a platform. In many cases, not always, we actually met some very smart airports, but in many cases they do not realize that they are more similar to Amazon, or what they think and they can learn from Amazon: how to evolve and how to innovate. So this is part of what we do.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, really interesting. Just to let you guys know, I see we are joined by Nicola, who is an Amazon manager from Italy. So just bear in mind that you have expert eyes upon you, people who will have a very clear … and could probably be doing some consulting work in the airports as well. So I’m going to take some of these questions, we’ve got some good questions and again we are being joined by, I see someone’s joined, Aninda from India is here, we’ve got someone from Rome, we’ve got someone from Brussels, they keep on coming, which is fantastic. Let me find the question I was going for. Frank Carlberg is here. As digital platforms increasingly integrate AI to individualize content and improve efficiency, what will happen to the way human beings think and to our quality of life? As ever, a good question from Frank.

Tommaso Buganza:

Wow.

Des Dearlove:

Big question.

Daniel Trabucci:

Well this is definitely a big question. There are some technologies in the metaverse – and AI are definitely there in our opinion – that are not necessarily platforms but that are extremely coherent with the platform world. And Frank’s question would probably require a large reflection. I would answer probably with two points. On the one hand, platforms have already been using algorithms and or AI oriented technologies a lot in the last 10 years. The matchmaking that many transactional platforms do is actually triggered by AI engines. I can definitely say that, trying to study innovation within organizations, so leaving aside the pure platform model, I think what we are living through now, in the generative AI revolution, is putting ourselves in the position to critically reflect on what we are doing. We have an enormous opportunity but should find a way to properly assess those opportunities and leverage it. And we often say this story talking about platform thinking.

With all due respect, when we are teaching in class these topics, it happens quite often that there are people quite surprised by the mechanisms that we are talking about. And these stories are not that new. booking.com, eBay were created 30 years ago. Many of your current platforms we are talking about are now 10, 12, 15 years old. So it’s not something that happened the day before yesterday. They have been here with us for decades. We still believe … we see that there is very little awareness on this topic and when we get to AI, we’re kind of afraid that in a world where a lot of people are still not able to recognize the previous generation of models properly, this may be difficult, and scary, about the technologies to come.

So we do believe that human beings still have a relevant role in there, in actually putting in place probably one of our most important skills, which is critical thinking, which is on the content that a software is generating but also it’s becoming more and more important to have a clear understanding of the business model. We can also not call it a business model in our everyday life, that’s fine, but to have an idea of the behind-the-scenes, of the implications of what we are doing, on where we are putting our data, the important thing is being aware and I think that talking about these topics is very important.

Tommaso Buganza:

I was also thinking about Frank’s question, that you’re touching on one of the starting points of our research 10 years back. So the AI allows these digital services to be personalized, not customized, personalized. So you customize a service when you put together some components which have been already predefined, and you try to find the right combination that is the nearest to your need. Personalization instead means that it’s done for you. So it’s done exactly for you. So AI, this is mixing a couple of things. So on one side we are living in a world with a lot of sensors. So the phones we use, the watch we use, the ring we use. So all of these things are catching data and there is now the ability of catching the data, transferring the data, using the data, analyzing the data with AI in order to create a solution that is perfect to you.

So it’s their solution, it’s different from mine, which is great. So in terms of service development, it’s great. Of course we always say that every positive thing always has a dark side. So what is the dark side? The dark side is that if you only give me what I expect I want to have, you never put myself outside my comfort zone. You never put me in what is normally called the learning zone that Amy talks about. You are not forcing me to confront things that I don’t like and force me to think, and so on. So once again, I don’t think that technology is good or bad. I think that technology can be used in a positive or negative way. So as far as we only use AI integrated into platforms in order to create services that are only for you and keep yourself in a bubble, probably we are not using that properly. And back to the point, it’s a human responsibility. We truly believe in human responsibility in how things are done and how you use the technology.

Des Dearlove:

And what you’re describing there is the bubble, where people also talk about echo chambers of course and that we end up just hearing what we … just having our biases confirmed the whole time. But listen, the last time I spoke to you two, which wasn’t very long ago, we talked about unconventional platforms. Not all platforms rely on algorithms to do the matchmaking. Tell me a little bit more about unconventional platforms and I must confess I have a special interest in this particular subject.

Daniel Trabucci:

Well, unconventional platforms is the topic we’re working on with our PhD student who is actually doing our entire research path on this topic. We started two years ago reasoning on this, not the label but the idea actually from the cases that Tommaso just mentioned. So the airport, train stations and shopping mall that was actually mentioned in the very early papers on two-sided markets. Our belief is that as you said, as we were discussing before, these business models have always been around but in a certain way they were considered peculiar to certain industries.

Shopping malls work like that, the fish market works in that way, newspapers work like that. With platform thinking and with the digital evolution, we are now seeing that those exceptions can actually be a new normal, a new standard. And this is putting in place the space for reflection on many businesses that did have a peculiar business model but are actually having all the core characteristics of platforms. They do have multiple sets of customers needed to interact among them and there are some kinds of externalities. As Tommaso was mentioning, the numbers are lower so they are different. But they are actually a similar mechanism: living labs, coworking spaces. Can I say that? Can I say this … a community like Thinkers50, these are unconventional platforms. They are spaces and they are unconventional, meaning that there is not directly the digital app that lets you find the perfect match. And on the other hand they are unconventional because you don’t have the tag written on your jacket when you are going around in a certain way. But in the same place, different people have different roles and the idea of working on unconventional platforms is pushing us to help this type of organization in seeing themselves as platforms, not because we like to define platforms and I must say we like it, but because there are opportunities hidden in a platform structure. And if you recognize yourself as a platform, you can open up opportunities for innovation.

Des Dearlove:

And Thinkers50 is very open to innovation and evolution and all those things, but we are proudly still very much a human-driven platform. As much as we might call it curation rather than matchmaking, but to some extent it is the same thing. What we try to do is … you know, we’ve got a slogan: ‘thinkers plus doers equals impact.’ What we’re trying to do is bring the ideas into the heads and the hands of the people who can actually use them in order … that’s only the beginning, the point is to have an impact within organizations so that we end up with better led, better managed, better organized, more humane, all of those good things. But thank you for the shout-out.

I am interested to read this piece of research when it comes out. I’ll probably learn quite a lot from it. Anyway, that’s enough about Thinkers50. Let’s take some more questions from some of the people who are tuning in. I’ve got José from Costa Rica: In today’s landscape, numerous platforms are available, but what would you say are the critical factors that make some more successful than others?

Tommaso Buganza:

Oh, wow. It’s a very complicated question actually. So there is an easy answer but it’s not covering the whole thing I think. So the easy answer is, for the large majority of cases: numbers. So one of the reasons we are very often asked why in Europe we do not have so many big platforms as we do have in the US or in China. And basically there are many very different answers that could be connected to … the recommendations and so on. But the real big, big, big answer to this question is that it’s a matter of numbers. So if you have got a system which is based on networks nowadays, the value that you perceive is connected to the number of people on the other side. So if you are targeting a big market and only 0.01% of the potential customers are reacting, if your market is very big, you easily reach the critical mass, that point beyond which people on the other side will see the value.

But if you’re targeting small markets, so instead of targeting a market like in the US, so 380 million, I don’t know how many, you’re targeting Italy, 60 million, you need to have much more people reacting. It says 0.01% is not enough because you don’t get to the numbers. So the first answer to José’s question is basically it depends on numbers and how you start. So of course it’s easier if you’ve got a bigger market, but this is only part of the answer because I also think that things are changing rapidly and now there are some more variables that start to be relevant in the equation. So for a certain amount of time, matching people with everything. But now we see that there are some initiatives that want to add something more to the equation. It is not just to matchmake but to do something that makes sense and we see that somehow people and customers, we are reacting more positively to some services that are more meaningful.

Too Good to Go, I don’t know how many of you’re familiar with it, but it’s a basic transactional platform. You got people on one side, you got stores on the other side, food stores on the other side. At the end of the day the food store has got a certain amount of food that cannot be sold and so they decide to pack it up and sell it for a lower price. You must go there, you pick it up, you get a lot of food for less money, they still have got some money for food, otherwise it could be wasted. And even more important, it is not wasted. And the main reason why people do it is not really for not paying for the food. Of course somebody might do it for the sake of getting a few dollars instead of throwing away the food. It’s because it makes sense. And I think that at the basis of platforms there is a better usage of resources.

What we say is that platforms are based typically on idle assets, so some assets that have got some value inside that is not completely used. So it’s a better, more clever, more efficient way of doing business. And I think that this is becoming more and more relevant, not just in terms of what you do but why you do it. So to go back to José Luis, probably it’s a measure of numbers, but we also start seeing that what you’re doing is particularly relevant and the meaning, the purpose that you’ve got is particularly relevant.

Daniel Trabucci:

If I can follow up, I would add another factor, that is actually connected with this idea of the idle assets. So platforms that are more successful tend to repeat the platform game more than once. You see Uber created Uber, for example, just to make a very simple example, but in this idea of playing the platform thinking game more than once, there is one very relevant element, which means recognizing that many of the management and business models that we’re used to are not working or better should be slightly revised when dealing with platforms. One message that to me is super important is the idea of customer obsession. It’s amazing when you develop a service that you are customer obsessed, but if you are developing a platform and you’ve got the customer obsession of only the end users, the guys getting the food in Too Good to Go, the guys traveling in Uber or the travelers in Airbnb, well you have an issue because you are not properly designing a value proposition for the other customers; the restaurants for Too Good to Go, the host in Airbnb.

You can be customer obsessed but you need customers’ obsession. You need to be obsessed by various sides. And actually this little detail – that is actually understanding the essence of a platform – is a critical factor. To design multiple services, multiple value propositions that are coherent in an interactive ecosystem: that’s the platform. And this is actually on the one hand, the secret successes of many platforms, and the reason why many wannabe platforms actually fail.

Des Dearlove:

I think that’s really, really interesting what you’ve just been talking about because to some extent, as we are trying to make every business more sustainable, platforms seem to have a lot to offer. You just mentioned the word, Daniel: ecosystem, and the fact that these things don’t happen in isolation. It’s not just the people who want the food, it is we, all of us, the users of Planet Earth, have a stake in all of this stuff. And it seems to me from what you’re saying that platforms could be one of the ways that we can begin to address that. The other point you were making about perhaps needing to revisit some of the management ideas and theories and how we think about things. You mentioned Porter earlier, Michael Porter, who we think a great deal of at Thinkers50, he has a Lifetime Achievement Award and he topped the ranking.

One of his, I think, more interesting recent ideas was the whole idea of shared value. How can we make sure that the value, the pie as it were, the value is shared in a sort of an even-handed way or a way that makes sense? Because otherwise what you get is … I think there is a pushback against, obviously Facebook and some of these organizations, some of the big tech companies seem to want to take the whole lot, all the value. How do we address that? Particularly as we move into the AI, and I take your point from earlier too – we entered the AI era a long time ago; some of us are just catching up and realizing what’s been going on for a while, but how can we make it more equitable, I guess is what I’m asking you.

Tommaso Buganza:

And I think this is very difficult because the mechanism is incredibly efficient, which means that you are generating a lot of value. And typically what we say is that the platform provider is internalizing this value or part of this value. There are many people who are thinking about this and thinking about people at Harvard … and thinking about the brilliant book which is called …

Daniel Trabucci:

Cloud Empire.

Tommaso Buganza:

Cloud Empire, sorry.

Des Dearlove:

What’s it called?

Daniel Trabucci:

Cloud Empires.

Tommaso Buganza:

Cloud Empires. It’s a brilliant book about it. So the point is that we do not really have the mechanisms now. We have got a growing understanding of the problem. So the fact that we are starting to talk about value creation, value capturing and value sharing, so adding the third part that is value sharing, is already I think a great milestone. So we know that we’ve got something that we need to deal with.

Unfortunately the situation at this moment is not clear. So it’s not clear how to convince these companies that a part of what we are obtaining should be given back to society and community. In some cases this is happening more; in some cases this is happening less. We won’t name names now, but we all know about them. And I think that starting to talk about it is the first step. The second will be when we will have enough alternatives in order to start making some kind of pressure, as users, towards these companies. So they are so efficient that they are very difficult to attack. But if we start asking for a value sharing or part of the value … of course there’s nothing bad in capturing the value; it’s absolutely okay also because they do incredible work. So they’re great in what they do, but we cannot really imagine that they capture all this value only for them. This is not okay, this is basically not okay. So I think that this is a discussion that we need to push forward and to put in front of people more and more.

Daniel Trabucci:

If I can very briefly add to this, we recently had an event on LinkedIn that was titled Platform Renaissance and one of the messages that we started from is very coherent with what you said. These platforms are a structure that were created looking for efficiency to reduce frictions. And when we talk about sustainability, reducing waste, reducing the friction is actually a central idea. We are living as a society, as a planet, grand challenges that fortunately so far we haven’t lived, and now we’re living them.

We do believe that platforms, even though the name platform is sometimes misunderstood due to certain usage of that business model, can be part of the solution. And platform thinking or platforms are tools. Tommaso said it before, it’s not good or bad, the point is how you want to use it. But framing some problems through platform thinking can be part of the solution in our opinion. Finding ways to share or to get an easier access to idle resources, finding ways to actually answer to some of those challenges through the technologies that lie behind these mechanisms. We do believe there are a lot of opportunities there if we leave aside specific usages of this model and we look at the model itself.

Des Dearlove:

And we have run out of time, and it really was interesting to move into the whole sustainability conversation and to hear your points of view on that. I wish we’d had more time to explore that. Now for those people who are tuning in, Daniel and Tommaso invented or created the Platform Thinking Business Model Canvas, which I was looking at just before we came on and thinking we really need to use that at Thinkers50. I do recommend it. Where else can people go to find out more about your work?

Daniel Trabucci:

Well, it is simple. We are very active on LinkedIn and we do have a website that is at platformthinking.eu, that is getting all the resources we had is a lot of free material there and everything that is happening is actually being posted there.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, fantastic. Well, as I say, we’re out of time. Please do join us again on the 20th of March at the same time when our guest will be Hamilton Mann, Group Vice President for Digital Marketing and Digital Transformation at Thales. Daniel and Tommaso, thank you so much. I really enjoyed your company.

Daniel Trabucci:

Thank you very much.

Tommaso Buganza:

Thank you for having us. It was great.