Linking Multi-Perspectives to Enable Educated Decision Making in Digital Platform Design

Abstract

Digital platforms disrupt established industries and their current competitive dynamics. Interestingly, only a few very successful digital platforms achieve this transformation impact, as more than 80% of platforms fail. One of the main reasons for platform failure is overlooked competition. To support practitioners in designing a digital platform offering a competitive and compelling value proposition, we propose a multi-perspective approach. The multi-perspectives are integrated into a multi-step refinement process aiming at platform success: It analyzes the most common failure factors and selects corresponding detailed analyses integrating established frameworks and methods before deriving the value proposition design. To guide practitioners in adopting the multi-perspective approach, we propose its integration into the GOLD tool. This IT -based tool allows for transparency, hierarchization, dependencies, and interlinkages between the different perspectives toward a more holistic understanding and platform design.