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Adopting and implementing a platform-based business model is fraught with problems and complications, many of which are poorly understood even by industry insiders. As they try to sort through the best practices for operating in this new business environment, senior managers need to carefully analyze the strengths of the business model of some of most successful companies before trying to imitate them. .

For a team to execute such a strategy quickly and seamlessly it must first thoroughly understand the components of such a business model and how they interact to produce unique customer value and formidable competitive advantage

The platform is a new way to organize wealth-creating activity.

The author details the components of a successful platform-based business model.

Platform-based business models seek to leverage the assets of third parties and in the process extend the value of economic activity to customers in ways that engage and benefit them. Senior leaders and operations managers alike need to understand that continuous innovation of customer value and policies that attract asset-rich partners and skillful developers is essential to the growth of the network.

The Transformation Sprint methodology provides a customer-focused analysis process in which leaders can learn about how their digital operating model should and can evolve.

Agile transformation processes are a learning journey to produce a generative (learning) model. In an Agile setting, the plan should unfold along with experience.

Sprints with specific time spans are intended to circumvent scope-creep or other insidious ways that a project can overrun.

In Agile practice, showing and talking about work is a crucial part of the process. Transformation Sprints visualize Issues, Priorities and Points for Debate in notes posted on meeting room walls.

This article describes the Agile concepts that make a digital Transformation Sprint a potent addition to innovation practice.

To facilitate the cultural and technical changes that are a hallmark of successful digital transformation, a few leading-edge firms have adopted the principles of FLOW-Agile. 10; 10; 10;

The FLOW framework formalizes a visual representation of a company’s adaptive value-seeking process being implemented by Agile teams. 10;

In FLOW-Agile, the aim is to make all processes visible on the walls of operating units and to allow employees to collaborate in constant process redesign so they are continuously defining the best way to get work done.

A case example shows how Paddy Power Betfair, an online betting site, initiated a completely new system of open, visual and collaborative project and process design that now serves more than 3.5 billion application program interface (API) requests every day.

For leaders to guide their companies through the transition to digital culture, a sea change for established businesses, they must be able to understand and explain that culture in the context of the values and the flows of work that make digital-age companies successful. To facilitate the cultural and technical changes that are a hallmark of successful digital transformation, a few leading-edge firms have adopted the principles of FLOW-Agile, an adaptation of the Agile framework designed to enable small teams to accomplish rapid iterations of customer-focused projects in a networked system. The FLOW framework formalizes a visual representation of a company’s adaptive value-seeking process being implemented by Agile teams.

In this interview, author and management consultant Haydn Shaughnessy examines how the concept of ecosystems are transforming segments of the economy.

Shaughnessy is interview by radical management guru Stephen Denning.

Ecosystems of companies linked together for mutual gain are enabling interactions and promoting innovation in all the new economy segments. It is increasingly the innovations and expertise of the ecosystem, not the just the talents and resources of the firm, that are critical to future wealth generation.”

The Creative Economy … takes the form of delegation of responsibility to individuals and firms in ecosystems that find ways to cooperate and innovate while taking risks with their time and income.”

As an exemplar, explains how Autodesk, a leader in CAD/CAM software and building system modeling, has created a platform where companies in construction and civil engineering can draw on a growing number of apps created by an independent community, a dynamic ecosystem. By having continuous connection and securing continuous feedback, companies like Autodesk are able to provide continuous delivery or continuous updates of their products. You don’t need many people to do ecosystem platform business.

This article introduces the concept of a industry phase change. Phase-changes are historical transitions, ones that create a new industry and consumer ecosystem. They are not merely disruptive technologies.

A phase-change is marked by a complex transformation in human behavior produced by a new way to satisfy consumption needs. The Kodak case is described.

A current phase-change sweeping many business sectors is driven by the growing search for competitive advantage through connected ecosystems of stakeholders that co-create value – customers, innovators, partners and communities.

Co-creative ecosystems are a phase-change that requires a new set of executive and management skills, a different culture, a new approach to information, as well as new forms of leadership.

Explains the success factors of the four major types of modern ecosystems: scale ecosystems; creative commons/open source ecosystems; customer ecosystems; and systemic ecosystems. Shows how Kodak was disrupted by its lack of understanding of ecosystems management.

The author warns that nowadays a company must learn to be “co-productive” with an app developer community, a supplier community, a content community, an advocacy community or a customer ecosystem in order to stay competitive through continuous innovation. Leaders need new tools to promote informed decisions.

The article shows how companies monitoring dynamic ecosystem change can develop crowd-based reporting scorecards to guide decision making.

Increasingly it is the innovations and expertise of the ecosystem, not the talents and resources of the firm, that are crucial to its future wealth generation. But many of the consequences of ecosystem change are, in fact, unmanageable in any traditional sense. An experimental way to identify the uncertainty produced by a dynamic ecosystem offers decision support.

The uncertainty monitoring experiments described in this article can clarify the risk levels and the need for preparatory investments. They offer a high level view of the dynamics of the new market ecosystem environment.

This article offers cutting-edge insights for managers struggling to make decisions about investments related to the dynamic ecosystem of users, suppliers, partners and customers in their companies’ markets.

Describes how Agile teams can use strategic management tools and processes to discover market-creating innovations.

The related article “The next frontier for Agile: strategic management” in the previous issue of Strategy & Leadership explored the theory and possibilities of enterprise-wide Strategic Agility, a combination of Agile mindset and processes with strategic management theory to produce continuous market-creating innovation. This second installment offers insights from noted practitioners about implementing it.

The strategic concepts of Kim & Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy, Clayton Christensen’s Job to Be Done theory and Curt Carlson’s SRI Playbook – Need, Approach, Benefits per costs and Competition (NABC) can be adopted by Agile teams seeking innovations that create new customer value.

Identifying a well-defined Job to Be Done produces the start of an innovation blueprint which is unlike the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because of the much higher degree of specificity required to identify precisely what problem your potential solution would address.

Using strategic management concepts, Agile teams can redefine how needs are being met and in the process, discover value for customers from offering something or doing something that the company or the industry currently doesn’t provide.

The author explains how networked interaction, propelled by the internet and the forces of digitalization, ubiquitous connectivity, globalization and social media has become the new locus for creating value. And how that networked interaction is accelerating the shift of value creation towards the experiences of individuals who want to define choices in a manner that reflects their view of value and their own expressions of personalization. 10;

The article explains that every enterprise is now faced with the challenge of learning how to create valuable impacts of experienced outcomes through smarter, connected offerings and the networked interactions of individuals.

Instead of having fixed economic value, offerings are increasingly a means for the dynamic creation of experience value through ongoing and new types of networked interactions.

Rather than simply elevating the user experience of a good or service, the co-created experience itself becomes the product.

The Starbucks and Burberry examples suggest how offerings are being enhanced by interactive technologies that open up new sources and avenues of experience value creation. The article explains how any enterprise can now adopt a strategy of ‘capabilities as a service’ by innovating its own ecosystems of customer and stakeholder experiences.