Does it make sense to talk about innovation when talking about platforms? What is really innovative about services like Airbnb and Uber, but also many older cases like ebay, Booking.com or even Amazon? To fully grasp the innovative soul of platforms, we need to take a few steps back in history and understand that no, the model behind the digital platforms I just named is anything but new. Basically, all these platforms are based on a very simple concept: facilitating the meeting between those who are looking for something and those who are offering that something - be it the drivers and passengers of Uber, or the travelers and hosts of Airbnb or buyers and sellers on ebay. Ebay is what comes closest to the oldest case of platform: that of a marketplace. The concept of a marketplace exists since humans began trading. It is believed that the oldest bazaars were born in Persia, from where they spread throughout the Middle East and Europe. Documentary sources suggest that zoning policies confining trade to particular parts of cities begun around 3,000 BCE, creating the conditions necessary for the emergence of a bazaar. Middle Eastern bazaars were typically long strips with stalls on either sides and a covered roof designed to shade traders and buyers from the sun. In Europe, informal, unregulated markets gradually gave way to a system of formal, licensed markets beginning in the 12th century. Throughout the medieval period, the increased regulation of market practices, especially weights and measures, gave consumers confidence in the quality of market goods and the fairness of prices. Throughout the world, markets evolved in different ways depending on local environmental conditions, especially weather, tradition, and culture. The idea, however, is always the same, and it's very close to that of the platforms I mentioned earlier: to bring to the same place - in this case physical, in our examples digital - people looking for- and offering something, giving all parties the chance to find someone interested because of the abundance of opportunities in that space. That means the possibility of having so many sellers, even of very different products, that the buyer going to the market can find virtually everything he is looking for. At the same time, the possibility of having so many potential consumers - who go to the market because of the presence of other sellers - means that there is the possibility of turning masses of potential consumers who are at the market into real and paying customers So why are you pursuing a MOOC that can help platforms become a tool for innovation...if a concept very close to platforms has several millennials on its back? Well, the reason is extremely simple. We mentioned Airbnb and Uber as the flagship cases of this platform revolution, but actually we can also find slightly older cases in the club of big platforms. Companies like Booking.com, ebay, PayPal or even Amazon were born between the second half of the 90s and the first part of the new millenium. What may not be so obvious, however, is that these cases are the precursors of a giant revolution that started right from the great success of Airbnb and Uber, making the platform model proliferate in many sectors, in many countries and with very different purposes. But why does such an ancient model become the emblem of innovation in the second decade of the 2000s? The answer is very simple again and lies in the digital technologies, which have the ability to make a model as old as the market, efficient and extremely scalable, as it never was before. Is this super connection power an innovation? Well, I’d say not directly but if we consider the two dynamics together, the spread of digital technologies on the one side and the platform revolution on the other, we can easily see that their co-joint action is opening the way to an era of innovation. Let me show this with an example that - again - speaks about Uber. In 2015, Aswath Damoradan, a professor at New York University, launched a debate about the company's value. In those months, private investors had participated in funding rounds of 1.2 billion dollars, suggesting a value of the company of 17 billion dollars. The professor described this value as "a mind-boggling sum," a figure that was simply absurd given that the company in question had positive results, but was still small in terms of market penetration and revenues. The debate was taken up by Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital, one of Uber's main investors. Who publicly stated that yes, the valuation made by the market, as claimed by Damoradan, was absolutely wrong. But unlike the Professor's claim, Gurley argued that the value was underestimating the company's true value, as it lacked the consideration of the potential market and network effects underlying the entire system. Within a few years, Uber's value, without going public, would exceed tens of billions of dollars, reaching as high as $60-70 billion at times. This short story makes us understand the innovative potential we're talking about: a company like Uber is so far from the traditional logics of value creation and capturing to put in crisis even the most established tools of finance for the valuation of a company. We could make similar examples using other classic models in the world of management, such as the Porter's value chain...which involves a transfer of value from suppliers to the company, which, through internal operations creates additional value to be then proposed to the market or Christensen’s disruptive innovation that argue the need of a niche market interested in investing in niche products to make them slowly grow up to the point that they are interesting for the mass market. In the world of platforms, however, we do not find this linearity nor this time dynamics anymore. On the contrary, we find a much more complex system where the company acts as an orchestrator of value serving different customers at a time and disrupting industries in a few years if not months.. In other words, what I'm saying is that no, the platform model per se is not innovative, but it is bringing major revolutions and innovations in almost all the industries we know. This calls for a major innovation in the management world as well, generating new frameworks, strategies, tools, and models that you're seeing in this very course. Platforms are already promising new business models that undermine the traditional idea that customers pay directly for what they receive. We are so accustomed to free services like social networks that we start asking why we must pay for other services like newspapers. All industries will have to cope with this pretty soon. Let's consider, for example, what Spotify did to the music industry, enabling the transition from music ownership to access to a music library, disrupting not only the fruition of music by the end user, but also the commercial logics with which music is created, promoted and brought to the market. The innovative power of platforms, though, goes beyond the same platforms. We are accustomed to talk about digital start-up platforms but in reality their effect already shakes also old, traditional businesses. A great example is Disney. With Disney + , the company actually moved towards a platform strategy by exploiting an incredible valuable idle asset: their catalogue! This example shows how the platform revolution can help in fostering innovation even in existing and established businesses. To conclude: no, platforms are not an innovation per se. We are talking about a very old concept, but one that digital technologies have been able to bring to its full splendor, making it an enabler of innovation. An enabler that requires the skillful and careful eye of the innovator to be able to see in this ancient tool the possibility of doing something new, the possibility of changing the way we are used to operating in our sector. Hence, the need to switch to "platform thinking", the ability to see platforms where they are not and to consider them an effective way of orchestrating resources to unveil new and relevant opportunities for innovation.