Marshall Van Alstyne

Platform businesses have existed for years. Malls link consumers and merchants. Newspapers connect subscribers and advertisers. What’s changed today is that information technology (IT) has profoundly reduced the need to own physical infrastructure and assets, making building and scaling platforms vastly simpler and cheaper. The digital platform model is the future of business, and those that fail to learn the new rules will struggle to compete, says Marshall Van Alstyne, Ph.D. Based on his internationally bestselling book “Platform Revolution,” he offers leaders a roadmap for how to run a successful platform business today. In this presentation, he reveals strategies behind some of the most successful platform-based companies — including up-and-coming digital companies like Tinder and SkillShare and traditional companies like Nike and McCormick Spice — who have built platforms in non-technology markets. He also shows how platform strategies drive growth at large industrial and B2B firms such as Siemens, Mahindra and John Deere. Through a wider lens, he then offers participants a window into which markets are ripe for a platform revolution, including health care, finance, construction, education and energy, and explains how to navigate in and adapt to the changing marketplace. Van Alstyne also shows why platforms almost always beat products.

Many firms make decisions around investing or divesting without fully realizing the true value of what they are buying, or worse, what they are selling off. In the digital economy, traditional thinking around mergers and acquisitions doesn’t work, says renowned digital economist Marshall Van Alstyne, Ph.D., professor of information economics at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and co-author of the international bestseller “Platform Revolution.” An investment that may appear low margin, he explains, may actually offer a tremendous opportunity for engagement. “When Johnson & Johnson sold off their diabetes division, they lost a huge community that could have generated significant value at a relatively low margin of cost.” In this talk, Van Alstyne explains how value is a created in a platform-driven economy where firms leverage third-party users through network effects. Based on his extensive research, he offers participants a new way of looking at how and when to acquire, who to partner with, and where the true value of an organization lies. “It is no longer about your own assets but the assets of the community or partner you are acquiring.”

If your firm is not taking full advantage of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), you may want to re-think your strategy, says renowned digital economist Marshall Van Alstyne, Ph.D., professor of information economics at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and co-author of the international bestseller “Platform Revolution.” APIs allow valuable software and data in one system to talk to valuable software and data in another system, repeatedly and at scale. This makes them key mechanisms in how value gets exchanged in digital economies, with developers assembling APIs to create modern apps, letting those apps communicate, and combining them with cloud services. In 2010, Alstyne was the first to conduct research into the true value of APIs, a study he recently updated. In this talk, he shares his findings which showed that, over a 16-year period, firms that adopted APIs saw a whopping 38% more growth than those who didn’t. He then explains how your firm can strategically integrate them.

The rise of digital firms in the internet era – gigantic monopolies such as Meta, Amazon and Alibaba – is analogous to the rise of firms in the industrial era, but for completely opposite reasons, says renowned digital economist Marshall Van Alstyne, Ph.D., professor of information economics at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and co-author of the international bestseller “Platform Revolution.” A century ago, businesses operated in a product-focused supply side economy. Today, the success of platform-based digital giants is driven by network effects that leverage third party users in a demand-side economy – a business model Van Alstyne refers to as an “inverted firm”. In this talk, he explains how the inverted firm model shifts value creation from inside to outside the organization, from employees to ecosystem partners, and from products to platforms. He then discusses the importance of adopting the model to better compete in today’s economy and what it takes to make the transition.