This document discusses how companies become platform leaders. It defines platforms as systems of technologies that combine core components with complementary products from various firms. The platform leader and complementors form an innovation ecosystem that increases platform and complement value as more users adopt the platform. Platforms fuel continuous third-party innovation, transforming products into living systems with unforeseen uses. The document outlines how products can become platforms through coring, which identifies core elements resolving technical problems, and tipping, which shapes market dynamics to the platform's advantage. Size helps tipping but coring depends on technological leadership, not company size.

1. How Companies Become
Platform Leaders
TEAM E
Annabelle Gawer and Michael A. Cusumano

2. What is an Industry Platform
• Platforms are systems of
technologies that combine
core components with
complementary products
and services usually made by
a variety of firms
• The platform leader and its
complementors form an
“ecosystem” for innovation
that can greatly increase the
value of the platform and its
complements as more users
adopt the platform

3. The reason why platforms have taken on such a
key economic role is that platforms are engines
of innovation.
Platforms make us think very
differently about the nature of
products and services. Instead of
narrowly limited products or
services with predetermined
uses, they become alive, fuelled
by continuous innovation
brought about by third-parties.
What is an Industry Platform

4. Platform VS Product
A product is largely
proprietary and
under one firm’s
control
A platform is part of
an industry-wide
ecosystem, that is
no longer under the
full control of the
platform
owner, even if it
contains some
proprietary
elements

5. Prerequisite product’s conditions to have Platform
potential:
1. It performs at least one essential function within what
can be described as a “system of use,” or solves an
essential problem for many actors in the industry
– Could the overall system function without the particular
product or technology?
How product become platform?

6. How product become platform?
2. It is easy to connect to or to build upon to
expand the system of use as well as allow
new, even unintended, end-uses.
– Had external companies succeeded to develop
complementary and interoperable products, or at
least have started to do so?

7. Coring
• Identify or design an element (which can be a
technology, a product or a service), and make
it “core” to a technological system as well as to
a market
An element or a component of a
system is “core” when it resolves
technical problems affecting a large
proportion of other parts of the
system or opens up the system to new
usage possibilities

8. Coring

9. Examples of Successful Coring
Internet Search
Wireless Technology
Data Storage

10. Tipping
• the set of activities that a platform leader can
use to shape market dynamics

11. Examples of Successful Tipping
Web Server Operating Systems
Internet Browsers

12. Conclusions
• The size of the company is often an advantage
for TIPPING a market
• CORING is a possible option for any company
because technology and architectural
leadership do not directly depend on the size
of the company

13. Q&A