Platform Strategy for Business
Firms such as Apple, Alibaba, Facebook, SalesForce, Uber and Yelp operate platform ecosystems that match buyers and sellers, gain value and market share from network effects, and harness their users to innovate.
This course teaches you how to convert products to platforms and how to innovate in a platform environment. You will learn how to negotiate platform startup, convert existing products to platforms, and make vital decisions on issues of openness, cannibalization, and competition.
Learners in this course will solve real-life problems using concepts from two sided networks, information asymmetry, pricing, intellectual property, and game theory.
The instructor for this course literally wrote the book on the topic: " Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You. "
This course is part of both the Digital Leadership and Product Management MicroMasters programs.
- How to successfully launch and design a business platform
- Why platform firms beat product firms and how the structure of platform firms is fundamentally different
- Why traditional platform pricing models fail and how to choose a successful pricing model
- How to compete in winner-take-all network markets.
Marshall Van Alstyne (@InfoEcon) is coauthor of Platform Revolution , an international bestseller. He is one of the world's foremost experts on information business models snd is Questrom Chair professor at Boston University and a Digital Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. He is a frequent speaker, board level advisor, and consultant to both startups and global firms. His research has received half a dozen academic awards and appeared in top journals such as Science , Nature and Harvard Business Review. Interviews appear regularly across Bloomberg , The Economist , The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio. He holds multiple patents and has received a B.A. in computer science from Yale, an M.S. in Management and a PhD in Information Systems from the MIT Sloan School. His theories of network businesses are taught worldwide.
