Disruptive Innovation: Leveraging Multi-Sided Platforms

Multi-sided platforms have massively disrupted the business world. The success of Uber and AirBnb radically altered the transportation and lodging industries. As technology continues to evolve rapidly, thousands of other platform ventures hope to have similar impacts on other sectors. Some of these platforms might be operated by human-less decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), powered by blockchain, smart contracts, and artificial intelligence. 

This program examines what actually happens during the design, development, launch, and scaling of a digital platform business. Moving beyond theory, participants will explore on-the-ground challenges in strategy and management that building a successful multi-sided business platform entails. Participants will identify and develop the skills they need to grow—or compete with—a multi-sided platform venture. 

Participants in this interactive program will gain critical insights from detailed case studies created by industry experts and successful innovators. They will develop an in-depth understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, benefits, and consequences of this innovative business model for the different stakeholders in a platform’s ecosystem.

Program Benefits

• Learn the theories and examples of the key principles driving the success of platforms
• Develop the skills you need to design and analyze multi-sided platform businesses
• Identify the optimal route to test, launch, and grow a new platform
• Practice balancing supply with demand through pricing and marketing
• Prepare your business to face competition from platform companies and from Web3-powered decentralized platforms
• Predict the future of industries and markets as platforms continue to expand globally
• Earn a Certificate of Participation from the Harvard Division of Continuing Education

Topics Covered

• Key functions that every platform must perform to attract and serve customers, including assumptions, goals, constraints, and data that most platform managers encounter
• Potential strategic weaknesses, such as customers finding ways to avoid paying for the service and competitors enticing customers away from the platform (or multi-homing, where customers utilize two competing platforms simultaneously)
• Types and implications of “network effects”, where the value for each user on the platform is directly related to the number of other users
• Optimal boundaries of a platform’s offerings to balance control with innovation
• Counterstrategies that traditional, non-platform companies might employ to thwart the arrival of competition from platforms
• Technologies that will accelerate the rise of platform business models — but might undermine the success of platforms operated by centralized companies — with blockchain, smart contracts, and artificial intelligence

Format

The interactive online sessions will be a mix of small group exercises, plenary debates, and simulations. The interactive sessions will not be recorded.

Participants will prepare for each online session by watching pre-recorded lectures and interviews highlighting one or more case studies with platform founders. These videos must be previewed prior to the online sessions. 

Who Should Enroll

This program is intended for entrepreneurs and managers who seek to understand the drivers underneath the next big wave in the evolution of business. This includes strategists and product developers who seek to innovate business offerings, as well as technologists, investors, and marketers who are building, funding, and selling these offerings.