Platform Economy: Converging IoT Platforms and Ecosystems

Platform companies like Airbnb, Amazon, or Google dominate our economy, and many more are on the rise to disrupt entire industries. In fact, eight of the ten most valuable companies worldwide follow a platform business model. Their success depends heavily on developing and sustaining network effects. This makes it almost inevitable for managers to analyze their own opportunities and risks in the platform economy. For traditional and product-focused companies, the Internet of Things has created new opportunities for platform business. In this article, we explain how the underlying platform mechanics work and bring together the perspectives of IoT, platform, and ecosystem. Using three successful but distinct IoT platform examples, we illustrate that platforms are not only for digital players and highlight key success factors for any practitioner looking to develop and manage an (IoT) platform.