Development of a Morphology for the Description of Business Models for Technology Platforms

Abstract

The importance of technology platforms as coherent networks of resources, capabilities and competencies is steadily increasing in technology-based companies. The reason is that technology platforms support companies to cope with one of today's most critical organizational complexity topics; that is, the balance between the conflicting priorities of fulfilling the increasing customer demand for individualized innovation while generating company-wide technological synergies. Thus, the business success of technology-based companies can be affected to a significant extent by the development of technology platforms and a consistent description of their business models. That means describing their structural design, in order to ensure technology platform-related, commercial opportunities. In practice however, the structural design of technology platforms is often poorly described and technology platform-related, commercial opportunities are not fully utilized. The reason is mainly due to the fact that there is no established opinion about a consistent framework, which supports the systematic derivation of the constitutional and configurable dimensions of a technology platform. Therefore, in this paper we develop a morphology that defines and characterizes the dimensions of technology platforms, in order to enable the description of business models in the context of technology platforms.