MIT Platform Report 2022

RIDING
THE
PLATFORM
WAVE
The 2022 MIT Platform Strategy Summit tracked
where we’ve been and where we’re heading.

CONTENTS
Ellen Herlacher, principal at LRV Health, was
among the speakers at the first healthcare
platform summit event.
Platform Summit co-chairs, from left, Marshall
Van Alstyne, Peter Evans and Geoffrey Parker
04 A Ripple Becomes a Cresting Wave
The 10th annual MIT Platform Strategy Summit reflected
on a decade-long rise of platforms that have upended
traditional markets and created whole new ecosystems.
06 Platforms Opens Up
What a difference a decade makes. Summit co-chairs
Peter Evans, Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne,
along with Elizabeth J. Altman, outline the key trends to
watch.
09 The Tide Turns for Healthcare Platforms
Can digital platforms cure and create opportunities for the
U.S. healthcare sector? A half-day program explored both
the tech progress and the regulatory challenges keeping
healthcare on a slow but steady path to platform adoption.
10 Platform Review and Forecast
Network effects have played a key role in the rise of
platforms from B2C to B2B sectors. Are the metaverse
and Web3 the next frontiers?
12 Keynote Address
Dr. Alex Ng, VP of China’s Tencent Healthcare, described
a new platform designed to accentuate valid healthcare
information to encourage and improve patient care.
13 The New Digital Divide
Panelists discuss how geopolitical powers differ on the
best ways to approach the digital layers of marketing
systems and platforms.
14 MyLearning NFT
The trouble with training is that people forget much
of what they’ve learned. A new, non-fungible token,
demonstrated by co-founder Hari Abburi, aims to fix this
by financially rewarding continuous training.
15 Web3, Tokens, and Platforms
The debate is on: Is Web3 just a collection of niche
products? Or will technologies, including blockchain and
the metaverse, permeate today’s marketplaces?
16 Platforms Fuel Enterprise Talent Strategy
Platforms promise to connect organizations with qualified
workers. Panelists including Tapaswee Chandele of
Coca-Cola Co. and Anant Argawal of 2U discussed their
progress with internal and external talent platforms—and
what still needs to be done.
17 Fireside Chat: Fidelity Investments
Joanna Rotenberg, president of personal investing
at Fidelity Investments, explains how her group is
adapting to big shifts—technological and otherwise—
in the finance business.
19 The Future of the Retail Experience
Customer data is the big wave in retail. That’s leading to a
new business model that’s based not on selling products,
but instead on providing unique customer experiences.
Executives and analysts take a deep dive into these
immersive ideas.
19 Technology that Serves Society
For a different perspective, Dava Newman, director of the
MIT Media Lab, led a journey that brought the internet
deep into the ocean, made oxygen on Mars and implanted
AI into human brains.
20 Resources for the Next Decade
Prepare for the next 10 years of platform revolution with
these books and articles to read and IDE links to explore.
Look for the
icon to watch full sessions
A DECADE OF PLATFORM
PROLIFERATION
Global platforms have become so ubiquitous we barely take
notice: engaging with social media, online shopping and—even
for the reticent—banking and conducting business on sprawling
ecosystems of partners have become the norm.
The MIT Platform Strategy Summit has tracked this swift economic
transformation for the past 10 years. This year, we look at the past,
present and future of digital platforms, examining how they can
continue to broaden access and opportunities in every sector.
OPENING
REMARKS
The Platform Summit on July 14, 2022,
marked its 10th anniversary as a go-to
source of information, analysis and
forecasts about the rapid-fire changes
of the platform economy. More than
1,000 online and in-person attendees
learned how digital platforms continue
to transform industries, the economy
and workers.
MIT IDE Associate Director Devin Cook
welcomed in-person attendees to the 10th
annual Platform Summit.
2
3

PLATFORM DECADE IN REVIEW
A RIPPLE BECOMES
A CRESTING WAVE
The MIT Platform Strategy Summit celebrates its 10th anniversary this
year. Here’s a quick look at the last decade of Summit events and all-star
participants, courtesy of Summit co-chair Geoffrey Parker.
2013
The first MIT Platform Summit was organized by
“platform evangelists”– young academics who
developed a theory to solve the pricing puzzle of
“free” software and related business models. Google,
Facebook, Amazon and Netflix were testing the
platform waters.
2017
As platforms gained traction, the Summit attracted
speakers from the mainstream finance industry
and incumbent organizations, including GE Global
Research, Philips, SAP and Schlumberger.
2020
Due to the COVID-19
pandemic, the Summit
pivoted to an online-only
format. Nevertheless,
platform leaders from
Intuit, Mayo Clinic and
Ping An Bank addressed
global concerns and
challenges.
2014
Gaining global momentum and sharing knowledge,
the Summit attracted Ming Zeng, chief strategy
officer of China’s (then) leading platform, Alibaba,
and speakers from Deloitte, Upwork and others.
2018
This Summit highlighted the platform-transformation
vanguard, including Airbnb and Uber, and also legacy
brands Kaiser Permanente, Rolls-Royce and Siemens.
2021
The Summit was online-only for a second year.
Mainstream organizations continued to make the
platform transition, while others—such as EVgo
and entertainment platforms—took the plunge as
platform natives.
2016
2015
Drilling down into infrastructure issues, the Summit
drew a diverse group of executives from Cognizant,
Duolingo, edX and Samsung as well as other
platform innovators.
The tide continued to rise with the publication of Platform
Revolution by Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne and
Sangeet Paul Choudary—heading to a second edition.
Peter Evans and Annabelle Gawer also published “The
Rise of the Platform Enterprise,” the first global survey of
platform companies.
2019
Policy presentations by the U.S. Army and the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
added some sobering perspectives to the heady pace
of change. In addition, Amazon Web Services, eBay
and Facebook offered insights on staying afloat.
2022
The Summit goes hybrid, returning to MIT’s campus
with in-person and virtual attendees. As platform
ranks swell, panels examined what’s next for
Web3, regulation, labor markets and healthcare.
Investments continue to break records.
4
5

Summit co-chair Geoffrey Parker took attendees
through 10 years of platform progress and
examined where it’s headed in the next decade..
reassure ourselves we weren’t crazy. These business
models are real, and they will have a significant impact on
the world economy.”
Fast-forward 10 years and the accuracy of the hypothesis is
undeniable. As more than 150 in-person plus nearly a thousand
online attendees of this year’s summit heard, platforms are
now transforming—or poised to transform—entire industries
as well as HR and marketing.
“In this environment, which is changing at unprecedented and
unexpected levels, agility and the productive use of data is
more important than ever,” said Svenja Falk, managing director
of Accenture Research and one of the day’s moderators. But
new issues have surfaced as platforms proliferate, too.
Stretching the Global Boundaries
Falk’s panel explored several regulatory and geopolitical
barriers to sharing data. One factor raising these barriers: The
U.S., European Union and China each have very different ideas
about how—or whether—data should be shared.
Panelist Peter Weckesser, chief digital officer of Schneider
Electric, pointed out that in a traditional business like his,
data operates in two dimensions: internally, where data needs
to be accessible for insights across the organization; and
externally, as part of an open platform. That’s why Schneider
is experimenting with a new practice it calls “power couples,”
in which data projects are co-owned by both business-process
and IT platform leaders. “The data layer,” Weckesser added, “is
the foundation for any business process.”
Far from daily business constraints, prognosticators
anticipated what Web3 might bring in the not-too-distant
future. Led by Peter Evans, managing partner of the Platform
Strategy Institute and a Summit co-chair, the panel debated
blockchain, the metaverse, AI, virtual reality and more. To date,
they’ve attracted both advocates and skeptics.
“The metaverse is a set of possibilities and promises, but it
doesn’t exist yet,” said Lauren Lubetsky, co-author of a recent
Deloitte white paper on the topic. “It’s hard to imagine a world
of complete decentralization, where everyone owns everything
and no one is the central owner. That scares CIOs.”
At the same time, others noted that many businesses are
already experimenting with Web3 technologies. “We’re always
looking for new technologies that could displace current
technologies,” said Adam Schouela, head of emerging tech at
the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology. “Then we roll up our
sleeves, try it, and figure out what it means for us.”
The Retail Experience
The platform landscape varies among industries and follows
economic trends. For example, a panel on the future of retail
included a fascinating emphasis on experiential marketing. To
Jonathan Yaffee, a former marketing executive with Red Bull
and currently co-founder and CEO of experience relationship
management agency AnyRoad, “We’re transforming from a
‘things’ economy to an ‘experience’ economy.”
Yaffee and others cited Dick’s Sporting Goods, which has
turned its stores into sports places; Nike, which has outfitted
some of its retail stores with basketball courts; and Michaels
Companies, which created an online arts-and-crafts teaching
platform that reaches more than 1 million students a year.
These platforms not only create communities of loyal (and bigspending)
customers, they also provide the companies with
all-important data about those customers. As Yaffee explained,
businesses can then use that data to predict a customer’s
lifetime value, the new metric of success. The physical stores
are less about product sales—which can be done online—than
building on these experiences.
REVIEW
PLATFORMS
OPEN UP
It’s taken a decade for organizations to stop hoarding their
data and start sharing it. After years of watching and waiting,
mainstream organizations in a wide range of industries—
including education, manufacturing, finance and retail—are
finally getting on board with platform markets that unlock
data’s value.
That was a central theme of this year’s MIT Platform Strategy
Summit, a hybrid live/online event hosted on July 14, 2022,
by the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE). Leading
organizations have tapped into the power of platforms, using
open APIs and other applications to share data in internal
and external ecosystems. As a result, they’re benefitting from
The 2022 MIT Platform Strategy Summit
tracked the rise of open data and
business transformation.
network effects and revolutionizing markets as diverse as
social media, electric vehicles and healthcare.
While platforms are still emerging in a few sectors, they’re
vastly more accepted than they were a decade ago. That’s
when Geoffrey Parker, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth
College, and Marshall Van Alstyne, a professor of information
economics at Boston University, realized that the rise of online
companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google resulted
from their new business models based on platforms.
“One reason we launched this event,” said Parker, a Summit cochair
and research fellow at the IDE, “was to create a forum to
Hard platform problems have one underlying
cause: Network effects (NFX)
Understanding NFX gives power to explain, predict and control
1
2
3
4
Structure/ Why do platforms have such high market cap but so few assets or employees?
NFX drive inverted firms that harness external products and assets not usually counted on balance
sheets.
Strategy/ Why does traditional product strategy fail in platform markets?
NFX mean community is a key asset. Platforms want community, permissionless entry, not
competitor barriers to entry.
Regulation/ Why does antitrust fail in platform markets?
NFX increase in scale, not in breakup or splitting across competitors.
Fake news/ Why is misinformation such a hard problem?
NFX cause market failures, which need interventions not allowed by First Amendment speech
protections.
5 Future/ Can decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) dethrone platforms?
NFX require governance, which most DAOs don’t provide.
6
7

HEALTHCARE AND PLATFORMS
THE TIDE TURNS FOR
HEALTHCARE PLATFORMS
During the inaugural healthcare platform summit, speakers bemoaned the industry’s
lack of platform progress, but expressed hope for future investments and regulations.
More than 150 in-person attendees were able to interact with peers and
appreciate the lessons learned during two days of sessions.
PLATFORMS OPEN UP CONTINUED
Learning New Lessons
Additionally, platforms for education and training were a
hot topic—and one close to home for the academics at the
event. “Can universities become platforms?” asked moderator
Marshall Van Alstyne, a professor at Boston University and a
Summit co-chair. “Or are [universities] doomed to shrink?”
Chris Dellarocas, Associate Provost for Digital Learning at
Boston University, thinks the big brand universities will win
and small universities will only survive by specializing in niche
content. The university trump card is a deep relationship with
students that they should continue as lifelong learning centers.
The question is more than hypothetical. Anant Agarwal is
the founder of edX and now chief open education officer of
2U, a global online learning platform. His company’s more
than 4,000 courses have reached over 44 million learners
worldwide. There should be fewer universities, he believes.
“The teaching model is changing,” Agarwal said. “The old
lecture model of a ‘sage on a stage’ can be done more
effectively online.” But coaching of students is still done
side-by-side in person. That hybrid approach is “the future of
education,” in his view.
Tapaswee Chandele, Coca-Cola Co.’s global VP of talent
and development, provided a corporate perspective. The
giant multinational company takes its platform approach so
seriously that it has created a platform services organization
and is now launching an internal talent marketplace. “Skills
have become currency,” Chandele said.
Investing in the Future
A chat between co-chair Geoffrey Parker and Joanna
Rotenberg, president of personal investing at Fidelity
Investments, showed how high the platform stakes are for
legacy corporations. Rotenberg’s group handles investments
for one in every six Americans and is responsible for some
$4 trillion in assets under management.
Rotenberg and her associates find many traditional
transactions at the 75-year-old company are outdated.
Today’s young customers won’t phone a Fidelity agent, nor
will they personally visit their local office. Instead, they expect
to transact with Fidelity via their PCs, tablets and smartphones,
often over social media. “We’ve got to meet our clients of
today—and tomorrow—where they are,” Rotenberg said.
The Summit was capped by a mind-expanding presentation
by Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab. She
discussed such far-out topics as the search for life elsewhere
in the universe, making oxygen on Mars, a concept known as
Earth Embassy (complete with its own operating system), and
plans to surgically implant AI systems in the human brain. “It’s
all about design and action for the future we want to live in,”
Newman said.
Searching for life in outer space certainly isn’t among the
daily concerns of most businesspeople. But it illustrates that
when data is open and shared, it can finally deliver on its
promise of value.
The U.S. healthcare sector could use a dose of its
own medicine to cure its high costs, poor access and
bureaucratic lethargy. Could the elixir involve digital
platforms?
That was a main topic at the inaugural Platform Revolution
Comes to Healthcare event, held on July 13 as a new spinoff
of the MIT Platform Strategy Summit.
The upshot? “Healthcare is more than a decade behind
other industries in [platform] adoption,” said Vince Kuraitis,
principal and founder of consultants Better Health
Technologies. He cited a 2015 study by consultants
McKinsey & Co. showing that when it came to digital
adoption, healthcare ranked a poor 19 among 22 industries.
One serious hurdle to greater adoption is the simple force
of habit. Pharmaceutical salespeople are used to freely
walking into doctors’ offices, patients are used to going
to doctors they know, and doctors are used to making
referrals to their peers. “It’s all very personal and hard
to break,” said Adam Grossman, a partner in healthcare
investment firm Deerfield Management Co. Tight regulation
is another longstanding obstacle.
Sea Changes Coming
Nonetheless, the industry’s tides are turning and evolution
is under way. Healthcare is “beginning to understand
the economic power and value of exchanging data,” said
Randall Williams, managing director of consulting firm
Digital Care Advisors.
Evidence comes in the form of growing investment. Nearly
$30 billion in capital worldwide was invested in 2021, an
increase over the previous year of 25%, according to seed
fund Rock Health.
Even the U.S. government, known for its sluggish
bureaucracy, understands the value proposition platforms
offer for better medical care and data access. Starting later
this year, the U.S. Fast Healthcare Interaction Regulation
(FHIR, pronounced “fire”) will require all certified healthcare
providers to make their electronic health record APIs
available to others.
“We’re still a long way from perfect integration,” admitted
Micky Tripathi, national coordinator for health IT at the U.S.
Dept. of Health and Human Services. “But standardization
is improving, and the ecosystem is opening up.”
Rapid Growth
of Platform
Investments
12%
41%
DIGITAL HEALTH
INVESTMENTS
2017
2021
88%
59%
HEALTHCARE
INVESTMENTS
In 2021, platforms accounted for 41% of digital
health investments compared with 12% in 2017.
In additon, one-third of the CB Insights Top 150
digital health companies are platforms.
Source: Summit Health, Platforms in Digital Health, 2021
Year-end Report
8
9

PANEL
PLATFORM REVIEW
AND FORECAST
Elizabeth J. Altman Assistant Professor, Manning School of
Business, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Peter C. Evans Managing Partner, Platform Strategy Institute;
Platform Strategy Summit Co-Chair
Geoffrey Parker Professor of Engineering, Dartmouth College;
Visiting Scholar, MIT IDE; Platform Strategy Summit Co-Chair
Marshall Van Alstyne Questrom Professor of Management,
Questrom School of Business, Boston University; Visiting Scholar,
MIT IDE; Platform Strategy Summit Co-Chair
“My goal today has been
to give you one simple
idea: Network effects give
you the power to explain
what has happened,
predict what will happen,
and control the outcome.”
Marshall Van Alstyne
The Summit’s academic organizers gave high-level
overviews of the platform revolution and its impact.
Geoffrey Parker described his own revelation around
2005 when he and his colleagues noticed that a group
of fast-charging new companies, including Amazon,
Facebook and Google, were operating with new business
models. And unlike the failed models of the dot-com
crash, these models made sense and could be selfsustaining.
They were platforms. Going forward, expect
B2B platforms to adopt the same focus on reducing
transaction costs and increasing network effects just as
B2C platforms have done.
Manning School professor Elizabeth Altman emphasized
how platforms are transforming the workforce. Today, up
to half an organization’s employees can be contractors,
freelancers, consultants and gig workers. These workers are
increasingly hired and connected on platform ecosystems,
she noted.
Peter Evans said the rise of Web3 is already playing a
central role in three platform examples: crypto exchanges,
NFT marketplaces and metaverse worlds. Many are growing
rapidly. For example, tokens for just three metaverse
platforms—Decentraland, Sandbox, and Otherside—have a
market capitalization of $4.3 billion. Additionally, Web3 is
beginning to reshape the way brands engage customers.
Nike’s Nikeland store, set up in the Roblox virtual
environment, attracted 6.7 million visitors in its first four
months and is now an experience in Nike’s New York store.
A combination of virtual worlds and non-fungible tokens will
power new platform experiences, Evans said.
Marshall Van Alstyne said that most platform roadblocks
have a single underlying cause: network effects or
“externalities.” For example, why is platform strategy so
different from product firms? The orchestration of positive
externalities means inviting value producers onto the
platform rather than building barriers to keep them out.
Why is fake news such a difficult problem to solve? Mainly,
because the negative externalities occur off-platform.
These externalities create market failures that in turn
require intervention. The tricky issue is to address these
concerns while maintaining free speech. To break this
impasse, he expects, new forms of regulation or laws will
be required.
Emerging Trends
Elizabeth Altman of the Manning School
explained how platforms can transform
the workforce.
Web3/ The true economics of cryptocurrencies and
the metaverse will become clearer in the next few years.
Regulation/ Data privacy and security issues will remain
top-of-mind. Labor markets/ Hiring and the nature of
work itself will continue to transform. Sector growth/
No industry or sector is immune to platform incursion.
10
11

The Tencent Healthcare platform provides
impartial, fact-checked medical information
using WeChat and other social media to reach
hundreds of millions of patients in China. The
platform also offers live streaming with doctors
and medical professionals.
Dr. Alex Ng
Vice President, Tencent Healthcare
KEYNOTE
HOW TENCENT
FIGHTS MEDICAL
MISINFORMATION
Tencent Healthcare, a unit of China-based conglomerate Tencent
Holdings and a service platform on that company’s WeChat service,
set out to solve one big problem, then quickly found itself battling
another. The first problem was the general malaise of Chinese
healthcare. Dr. Ng, who is also a physician, explained that China is
plagued by imbalances between supply and demand, long waiting
times for care, complex processes, and crowded hospitals.
But just as Tencent began testing its medical app, the COVID-19
pandemic hit, accompanied by a great deal of medical
misinformation. At that point, Tencent shifted its primary platform
focus to establish an authoritative source of information as a way to
fight misinformation. The new resource offers fact-checked travel and
health information, including articles, videos and animations.
“What we can
actually do is drown
out misinformation
by offering a
centralized source
of good information.
Everything has been
verified and triplechecked
by our
editors and in-house
doctors to make
sure the information
we provide is true;
information that’s
comfortable for my
mom to read.”
Dr. Alex Ng
PANEL
THE NEW
DIGITAL DIVIDE
Peggy Gulick Director of Digital Transformation Operations, Kohler Co.
Peter Weckesser Chief Digital Officer, Schneider Electric
Helmuth Ludwig former CIO of Siemens; Professor, Edwin Cox School
of Business, Southern Methodist University
Supheakmungkol “Mungkol” Sarin Head of Data and AI Ecosystems,
World Economic Forum
Svenja Falk Panel Moderator; Managing Director, Accenture Research
This panel was based on research conducted over the past year
with a simple premise: Every physical system has a digital layer.
In addition, the major geopolitical powers—specifically, China, the
European Union, and the U.S.—have dramatically different ideas about
how this digital layer should be designed.
Reflecting their diverse backgrounds, the panelists addressed global
disparities with a wide spectrum of ideas. Among their common
concerns and priorities are: How to scale innovation; how to monetize
data; and what a successful platform ecosystem looks like.
Svenja Falk of Accenture Research (at left) led
a lively panel on scaling innovation, monetizing
data and more.
“We need to make
sure that some
of the largest
companies share
their best practices
around data. What
is the data principle?
What is their data
governance? Those
best practices can be
shared and learned.”
Mungkol Sarin
12
13

Hari Abburi, co-founder of MyLearningNFT,
explains why learning needs to be
continual—and how it can be driven by a
dynamic non-fungible token.
Hari Abburi
Co-Founder, MyLearningNFT
Managing Partner, The Preparation Co.
PRESENTATION
MYLEARNINGNFT
“You have two challenges.
Challenge number one is how
do you know the participants
[of a training event] keep on
learning? We have no idea.
The second challenge is
that you have the forgetting
curve. And it’s very real.”
Hari Abburi
Every year, nearly $200 billion is spent in the United
States on employee training and development.
However, the results aren’t obvious when it comes to
what people learn in those trainings, how much they
actually remember and use, and how much value
businesses get from their huge investments.
Hari Abburi and his colleagues at MyLearningNFT
(including Peter Evans) believe they have the answer.
They’ve created a dynamic non-fungible token (NFT)
that motivates holders to learn something every 90
days. The approach is now in pilot testing, and Summit
attendees were invited to join the limited, free test.
The underlying idea is that the most effective way
to address the “forgetting curve” is with continual
training. In other words, receive basic training, then
augment it with additional learning, whether by reading
a book or article on a related topic, attending a class,
or listening to a podcast or webinar.
Participants in MyLearningNFT receive tokenized
certificates that gain or lose value based on the
learning actions they take after a training course
or event. If a participant takes no action, their NFT
degrades. But if they take learning actions, such as
listening to a relevant podcast or reading a related
article, their NFT appreciates. The NFT provides a
mechanism to reward continuous learning and ward
off the depreciation of knowledge associated with the
natural effects of forgetting. All participants at the
MIT Platform Strategy Summit were eligible to receive
a dynamic learning NFT to encourage continuous
learning about platforms.
PANEL
WEB3, TOKENIZATION,
AND PLATFORMS
Lauren Lubetsky Strategy Manager, Monitor Deloitte
Tim Rice Co-founding CEO, CoinMetrics
Skip Roncal Global Lead, Salesforce & AWS Solutions, CME and Gaming
Industries, Salesforce.com
Adam Schouela Head of Emerging Technologies, Fidelity Center for
Applied Technology
Peter C. Evans Panel Moderator
“There’s been $120 billion
invested this year in the
metaverse and Web3.
That’s more than double what
we saw invested last year.”
Lauren Lubetsky
Web3 enters the mainstream
Crypto
Cryptocurrencies held by 300 million
people across Asia, North and South
America, Europe and Africa
Investment
Venture capital firms invested $33
billion in Web3 startups in 2021
How will Web3—a catchall term for new
technologies including blockchain and
the metaverse—affect platforms? The
conversation also addressed the related
issues around Web3 products: are they
niche only, or are they headed for
the mainstream?
Lauren Lubetsky at Monitor Deloitte sees
both Web3 bulls and bears. And because
Web3 technologies are still so new, she
believes both sides can learn a lot from
each other.
Fidelity not only looks for emerging
technologies but actually rolls up its
collective sleeves to build them, said Adam
Schouela about his group at the financial
services provider. His team believes
experimentation is the only way to determine
whether a new technology can help Fidelity,
and if so, how.
CoinMetrics’ Tim Rice explained how
blockchain technology can be used to verify
the ownership of Bitcoin or other digital
currencies, what he referred to as asset
provenance. “If you want to understand if your
address has Bitcoin on it, we have the tools
for you to see that,” he said.
Salesforce is exploring the use of eventstreaming
architectures currently employed
by gaming companies to better understand
its own customers, according to Skip Roncal.
The goal: a unified view of customers across
both physical and virtual worlds. “If you look
over the history of our platform,” he said, “you
can see that most of our innovations were
customer-driven.”
NFTs
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) transaction
volume grew to $40 billion in 2021
Mergers & Acquisition
Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard for
$68.7 billion to enhance its metaverse plans
14
15

Panel moderator Marshall Van Alstyne (left) listens as
Tapaswee Chandele describes Coca-Cola’s dedicated
Platform Services organization.
“Companies need
to focus on lifelong
learning for their
employees. And
individuals need to
focus on continually
refreshing themselves,
rather than living on
degrees they earned
30 or 40 years ago.”
Anant Agarwal
Joanna Rotenberg of Fidelity tells moderator Geoffrey
Parker, “We have to meet clients where they are.”
PANEL
PLATFORMS POWER
ENTERPRISE TALENT
STRATEGY
Anant Agarwal Founder, edX; Professor, MIT; Chief Open
Education Officer, 2U
Tapaswee Chandele Global VP of Talent and Development,
Coca-Cola Co.
Chris Dellarocas Associate Provost for Digital Learning and
Innovation, Boston University
Patrick Petitti Co-founder and CEO, Catalant Technologies
Marshall Van Alstyne Panel Moderator
This panel discussed how platforms are changing
education and what the implications for established
universities are. Can they become platforms, or are
they doomed to shrink?
Chris Dellarocas is bullish on platform adoption.
Universities not only match students with programs,
they also develop deep relationships with those
students. That needn’t stop with graduation, he said.
Boston University, for example, has some 350,000
alumni who could potentially become lifelong career
coaches offering programs and support.
Anant Agarwal agreed, but also argued against allowing
each university to create its own platform. “That would
just duplicate the crazy situation we’ve had for 300
years,” he said. A better approach, he added, would be
the creation of an open-source consortium.
In the private sector, Pat Petitti explained Catalant is
already creating a platform that matches independent
consultants with organizations that need very targeted
help. The company says its customers enjoy 30% to
50% savings compared to what they’d spend engaging
a larger consulting firm.
At Coca-Cola, Tapaswee Chandele is committed to
platform models via a dedicated Platform Services
organization. The company is also about to launch
a talent marketplace using a platform previously
developed for another use.
FIRESIDE CHAT
MAKING INVESTMENT
PERSONAL
Joanna Rotenberg President of Personal Investing, Fidelity Investments
Geoffrey Parker Panel Moderator
Joanna Rotenberg explained how her group, which
helps retail customers with their personal investments,
is adapting to big market shifts caused by the rise of AI,
blockchain, and 5G. On top of that, half of Americans
are now millennials or younger, and they spend a lot
of time on their connected devices. The days when a
customer would call Fidelity on the phone or visit a local
Fidelity office are ending, Rotenberg said, replaced by
a massive shift online. “We have to meet clients where
they are,” she added.
That’s a tall order, given that parent company Fidelity
Investments manages $11 trillion in assets, employs
tens of thousands of people, and does business on
average with one in every six Americans. For being such
a large company, it still feels like a family,” Rotenberg
said. “Our ability to make the digital experience
seamless, both person-to-person and across our
platforms, is job one.”
“Data is everything for us. We spend a lot of time on
enriching our data, making sure it’s high-quality...
because it’s such an important foundation.”
Joanna Rotenberg
16
17

PANEL
THE FUTURE OF
THE RETAIL
EXPERIENCE
Tom McFadyen President, CEO and Founder, McFadyen Digital
Mert Damlapinar Director, eRetail Strategic Insights and Tech
Products, L’Oreal USA
Jonathan Yaffe Co-Founder and CEO, AnyRoad
Peter C. Evans Panel Moderator
Tom McFadyen explained that there are now hundreds
of huge global marketplaces—ranging from the trilliondollar
Alibaba to the half-trillion-dollar Amazon to the
$30 billion Mercado Libre in Latin America. Compared
with conventional retailers, they are generally much more
profitable, faster to market, and realize value and revenue
much more quickly.
By contrast, traditional product companies often know
little about their end customers: Buy a bottle of shampoo
at your local drugstore and the company that makes that
shampoo won’t learn your name, age, address or much
of anything else about you. But that’s changing rapidly as
consumer-products makers lean into the power of data
and platforms.
L’Oreal, for instance, recently launched its own B2B
marketplace, called SalonCentric. As Mert Damlapinar
explained, the platform attracted some 500 vendors in
just its first month. And it’s not only for hair products;
there’s also food, furniture, fitness and more. L’Oreal is
also exploring the use of the metaverse, he said.
Jonathan Yaffe provided another example from The
Michaels Companies. AnyRoad helped Michaels build
a marketplace for arts and crafts classes that attracted
20,000 art teachers who provide painting and other
classes. Michaels has scaled this experience and
learning platform to more than a million art students
per year, who not only pay for classes but also buy
their supplies through Michaels. The company handles
fulfillment and gains critical new customer data.
“Bucky [Buckminster
Fuller] got it right when
he said, ‘Make the
world work for 100%
of humanity in the
shortest possible time,
through spontaneous
cooperation, without
ecological offense
or disadvantage to
anyone.’ It’s a big ask,
but we’re on it.”
“I think traditional retail is completely dying. The retailers
that will be around in 10 years will all be experiential
companies that happen to sell goods on the side.”
Jonathan Yaffe
Dava Newman
Director, MIT Media Lab; Apollo Program
Professor of Astronautics, MIT
MIT MEDIA LAB
TECHNOLOGY THAT
SERVES SOCIETY
The day’s final presentation boldly took Summit
attendees where no attendees had gone before–
into the ocean, off to Mars, and even into the
human brain.
MIT’s Media Lab is famous for its creative projects,
and that tradition continues. One recent experiment,
called Moxie, aims to make oxygen on Mars, explained
Dava Newman, Media Lab director. Another Media
Lab project created a 3D knitting machine that can
make spacesuits for astronauts that are both flexible
and lightweight (about 44 pounds vs. the current 260),
yet still safe enough for trips to outer space. Also
under way: creating an Internet of Things to be used
in the oceans to determine the exact makeup and
composition of the undersea world.
Looking further into the future, Newman also outlined
what she called “human augmentation”—the process
of surgically implanting an AI system in a human
being’s brain. It may sound like science fiction, but MIT
engineers believe this surgery could be achievable
within the next 10 years.
18
Dava Newman
19

RESOURCES
RESOURCES FOR
THE NEXT DECADE
Prepare yourself for the next 10 years of platform
proliferation with these valuable resources.
Platform Revolution: How
Networked Markets are
Transforming the Economy—
and How to Make Them Work
for You
A book by Geoffrey Parker,
Marshall Van Alstyne, and
Sangeet Paul Choudary (W.W.
Norton, 2016). Second edition
(pictured) is in progress.
Marketplace Best Practices:
Transforming Commerce in
the Platform Economy
A book by Tom McFayden
(McFayden Digital, 2021).
THANK YOU
This year’s Platform Strategy Summit was made possible by
the generous contributions of our IDE Corporate Members,
individual donors, and our foundation partners.
Supporters
Accenture (Founding Member) • 3M Company • Akkodis • AB InBev
Autodesk • Boston Globe Media • Capgemini • General Motors • IRC4HR
Meta • Netflix Inc. • Schneider Electric
Foundations
Ewing Marion • Kauffman Foundation • Google.org • MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
Nasdaq • New Venture Fund • TDF Foundation
Individuals
Nobuo N. Akiha • Joe Eastin • Michael Even • Wesley Chan • Aaron Cowen
Ellen and Bruce Herzfelder • Reid Hoffman • Richard B. Homonoff
Edward S. Hyman Jr. • Gustavo Pierini • Gustavo Marini • Tom Pappas
Jeff & Liesl Wilke • and other individuals who prefer to remain anonymous
Rise of the Platform Enterprise
A global survey by Peter C.
Evans and Annabelle Gawer
(Center for Global Enterprise,
2016).
Electric Vehicles Are a Platform Business: What Firms Need
to Know, an article by Edward Anderson, Hemant Bhargava,
Jonas Boehm and Geoff Parker (California Management
Review, 2022).
Can NFTs Spark Continuous Learning? an article by Peter C.
Evans, Geoff Parker, and Marshall Van Alstyne (Medium, 2022).
Unlocking Business Model Innovation through Advanced
Manufacturing, a white paper by Jag Srai, Geoff Parker,
Nitin Joglekar, Maja Bärring, Jonas Boehm, Eric Enselme,
Maria Basso, Francisco Betti, and Benjamin Schönfuß (World
Economic Forum, 2022).
Q&A: How a Decade of Platforms has Upended the Global
Economy, an interview with the Platform Strategy Summit cochairs
(MIT IDE, 2022).
A Whole New World? The Metaverse and What it Could Mean
to You, a white paper by Alan Blau, Lauren Lubetsky, et al.
(Deloitte, 2022).
Will Platforms Cure Healthcare Ills? a blog post by Paula Klein
(Medium, 2022).
Open Data Propels Platforms, a blog post by Peter Krass
(Medium, 2022).
Preparing the Next Generation
of Platform Leaders: Staffing
and Training the Inverted Firm
A paper by Peter C. Evans,
Geoffrey Parker, Marshall
Van Alstyne, and Dyan
Finkhousen (SSRN Electronic
Journal, 2021).
Digital Transformation Changes How Companies Create
Value, a digital article by Marshall Van Alstyne and Geoffrey
Parker (Harvard Business Review, 2021).
Making Sense of the NFT Marketplace, a strategy paper by
Peter C. Evans and Pavel Kireyev (Harvard Business Review,
2021).
‘In Situ’ Data Rights, a research paper by Marshall Van Alstyne,
Georgios Petropoulos, Geoffrey Parker and Betin Martens
(Communications of the ACM, 2021).
Free Speech, Platforms & the Fake News Problem, a research
paper by Marshall Van Alstyne (SSRN, 2021).
MIT 2021 Platform Strategy Summit Special Report:
Platforms Mean Business (MIT IDE, 2021).
Workforce Systems: A New Strategic Approach to the Future
of Work, a survey report by Elizabeth J. Altman, Jeff Schwartz,
et al. (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2021).
The Future of Work is Through Workforce Ecosystems, a
research highlight by Elizabeth J. Altman, David Kiron, et al.
(MIT Sloan Management Review, 2021).
Platforms and Ecosystems: Enabling the Digital Economy,
a white paper by Michael Jacobides, Arun Sundararajan and
Marshall Van Alstyne (World Economic Forum, 2019).
CONNECT WITH US
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economy and society.
Read >
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Check out cutting-edge books,
research briefs, special reports
and more.
Browse >
Content by Peter Krass and Paula Klein. Event photography by Andrew Kubica.
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