Want to have platform business?

By harnessing the insights hidden in your data, you can give your customers the products and services they truly want.

Before the turn of the twenty-first century, the really successful businesses on the planet were true specialists. Whether they were in finance, automotive, retail or energy, most major firms succeeded by producing a handful of products or services and selling them to a well-established customer group.

But in the last 20 years, a new business model has replaced this old order. Today’s most valuable firms don’t just produce goods -they connect customers to the things they want. Welcome to the age of the “connect”.

This new approach to business has completely rewritten the rulebook. Instead of a transactional relationship, platform firms build ecosystems that give customers a series of connected products, services or experiences. And at the heart of this ecosystem is a positive feedback loop powered by the platform economy’s most valuable asset: data.

Creating a successful platform-based business is about turning data from a cost into a source of value. “You may think you’re in a certain type of business, but in reality, you’re also in the data business.

So how should firms make the jump towards becoming a platform? They should start by identifying new products and services that are adjacent to their core products. “Internally, there’s a bunch of data that firms have that’s trapped in siloed databases. By letting data scientists and strategic thinkers loose on that data firms can identify patterns about their customer behavior to infer needs that they may not be servicing.

Once that customer need has been identified, it’s time to put to the test a new product or service that meets that need. “As long as you can rapidly ideate and test something, you get a sense of what’s working and what’s not. The key here is to test new products quickly, using data to judge which are successful. One company I worked with tested 10s of new service propositions, even though it wasn’t in the its core industry space at all.

This ability to quickly test new propositions is a hallmark of software companies, with weekly -or even daily- update cycles that enable firms to trial new ideas at speed and throw out the ones that aren’t working. And once they’re in the marketplace, good news products tend to find a home.

But if other firms want to make the leap to becoming a platform, there’s only one way forward: experimentation. “The pace of advancement is driven by your ability to test and industrialize at speed.

Think about yourself, your company, our Innovation Center Experts can turn your business to PLATFORM.

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Batur Erdoğan