Plattform-Strategie

Platform strategy consulting is the work of deciding whether a company has a platform business model at all, and if it does, which interaction between participants compounds, what each participant contributes that the others cannot get elsewhere, and how the economics change once they do. A platform business model is not a piece of software. It is a business whose value comes from interactions between parties it does not own. Vivaldi has worked on that question since 1999, inside our digital platforms and ecosystems practice.

The distinction decides everything that follows. A digital platform is an asset: an API layer, a data product, a portal, a set of shared services. A platform business model is an economic structure in which your participants create value for each other, and your margin improves because they do. A company can own a very good digital platform and run an ordinary pipeline business on top of it. Most do. If what you need is the technology side of that question, the right page is digital products and platforms, which covers digital platform consulting and the build itself. This page is about the business model.

• Seit 1999Plattform- und Ökosystemstrategie
• Über 200veröffentlichte Fallstudien
• 10 Niederlassungenauf vier Kontinenten
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche: Das Beste aus den Bereichen Beratung, Strategie und Innovation
• The Interaction Fieldby our founder Erich Joachimsthaler, PublicAffairs

Wenn Unternehmen uns beauftragen

• Capital has been approved for a platform, and the board is being shown adoption numbers rather than compounding ones
• A large partner program exists and has never behaved like an ecosystem: partners resell, and nothing happens between them
• The second capability launched costs about what the first one cost, so nothing in the system is getting cheaper with scale
• A competitor has started convening the same participants, and the question is whether to join their field or build one
• Finance is funding a platform on pipeline payback assumptions, and the two have opposite capital profiles

Why a platform roadmap is not a platform business model

Read the average platform strategy and you find a sequence of features ordered by engineering capacity, with partners appearing as a channel and customers appearing as users. Nothing in it describes value moving between participants. It is a product plan with a new cover, and it will be funded, staffed and measured as a platform.

The test is arithmetic. Does the value participants create for each other grow faster than the value you deliver to them? If it does not, you have built a distribution channel with a higher cost base and a longer payback. That is a real thing to own, but it should be judged as one.

The reasonable version of the opposing view is that somebody has to build something before anyone joins it, and that is true. The failure is not building first. The failure is never converting what you built into a reason for participants to create value for each other, then carrying platform costs for years on the strength of the label.

What our platform strategy consulting services include

1. Platform business model diagnosis

Before design, a verdict. We establish whether a genuine platform business model is available to you: whether there is a shared interest that makes participation voluntary for parties you do not control, whether any participant contributes something the others cannot source elsewhere, and whether any interaction between them gets more valuable as it repeats. Companies regularly leave this stage having decided not to build a platform, which is a cheaper answer than discovering it in year three.

2. Naming and measuring the compounding interaction

One interaction, written in the participants’ own language, that becomes more valuable to everyone each time it happens. A platform strategy that cannot name it does not have one. We then put measurement on it before scale exists: how often it happens per participant, whether it improves with repetition, and whether the feedback path returns anything to the system. Registrations and traffic rise on launch spending. Those measures do not.

3. Demand space and the right to convene

Most platform programs start from something the company already owns: a data set, a customer base, a distribution network, infrastructure that looks underused. That is the wrong end of the problem, and it produces platforms that are technically sound and commercially inert. We start from the demand space, meaning what people are actually trying to get done, which in the valuable cases cuts across the categories incumbents organize around. That is precisely why a platform can be built on one: the space already spans several firms’ territory, so convening is worth something to everyone in it. Then we test whether you have a credible right to convene those parties rather than only a wish to.

4. Platform economics and value capture

How the model earns, in the units the board uses. Where the take sits and who pays it, what is given away to make the interaction happen often enough to matter, how pricing works when one side subsidizes another, and what the model does to capital intensity when a share of the assets serving your customers sits on someone else’s balance sheet. We also price the governance cost honestly, because admission rules, ranking and dispute resolution are an operating expense as well as a strategy.

5. The investment case and the staged build

A platform consumes capital early and returns margin in proportion to what participants do, so it cannot be funded on a product payback curve. We build the case in stages tied to the compounding interaction rather than to releases, with an explicit reopening point: if the second capability costs what the first one cost, the investment case is reopened rather than extended. CFOs tend to find that single condition more useful than the rest of the plan.

How a platform strategy engagement works

1. Diagnose. Leadership and finance interviews, participant research on the parties you do not control, and a review of what the current platform actually produces. The output is a verdict on whether a platform business model is available here, with the reasoning written down.
2. Decide. The demand space, the field of play, the participant set, and the one interaction that must compound. Options are stress tested with finance before anyone draws an architecture. The output is a decision with exclusions, not a menu.
3. Model. Value capture, pricing and subsidy across sides, capital intensity, governance cost, and the staged investment case with its reopening condition. The output is a business model a CFO can fund and challenge.
4. Embed. The measurement model for the compounding interaction, the decision rights that keep it protected, and the handover so your teams run the model after we leave.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for platform strategy

The framework behind this work is our own rather than borrowed. The Interaction Field, written by our founder Erich Joachimsthaler and published by PublicAffairs, argues that value in a modern business is created between participants rather than delivered by a firm to a customer. Platform strategy is what happens when a company takes that seriously enough to change how it earns.

Three things tend to separate the work. We will advise against a platform, and do, when the shared interest is thin or no interaction compounds. We write the business model in the terms finance already uses, so the decision is made by the people who control the capital rather than presented to them. And we start from demand rather than from the asset you happen to own, which is the difference between a platform someone outside the company needed and one that was available to build.

Vivaldi has worked across platform and ecosystem questions since 1999, from 10 offices on four continents, and the firm has been recognized five times in the WirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting awards for strategy and innovation.

How to evaluate a platform strategy consultant

Das sollten Sie bei jedem Unternehmen auf Ihrer Auswahlliste erfragen – auch bei uns.

• Ask them to name the compounding interaction in one sentence, in the participants’ language. A firm that answers with a feature list is describing a product.
• Ask what the second capability costs. If the answer is the same as the first, nothing is compounding and the platform label is doing no work.
• Ask who the participants are that you do not control. A model built only from parties you can instruct is a supply chain with a portal.
• Ask how the model earns, and who pays. If value capture arrives after the architecture, it will be constrained by it.
• Ask what would make them advise against a platform. A firm that has never given that advice has not been asked a hard enough question.

Platform strategy consultancy, a digital platform integrator or a management consultancy?

Verwandte Arbeiten

Platform questions rarely arrive alone, and several of them belong to neighboring teams.

• Digital platforms and ecosystems is the parent practice and covers digital ecosystem consulting as a whole.
• Digital ecosystem design takes the design of the ecosystem itself and its governance.
• New business model design takes the design of a new business model where the answer is not a platform.
• Interaction field Die Modellierung stützt sich auf das „ interaction field “ als formales Modell.
• Ecosystem branding takes brand ecosystems and how a brand holds a multi party system together.
• Business model innovation takes the prior question of whether the model has to change at all.
• Global digital programs takes delivery of digital programs across markets.

Background reading from our own archive: platform business model examples and growth, designing a platform business, and the inverted firm with Geoff Parker. The book behind the method is The Interaction Field.

Platform strategy consulting in the US and worldwide

We work with companies from 10 offices on four continents, which matters more for platform work than for most strategy questions. Participation rules, data sharing and what counts as fair ranking differ by market, and a platform business model that works in the US can be unfundable in Europe for reasons that are regulatory rather than commercial. Engagements usually run from New York or from our European offices, with participant research done in the markets where the interaction actually has to happen.