Success Factors of Digital Platform Design

Abstract

Digital platforms disrupt today’s industries with novel offers and business models. Despite their revolutionizing impact, over 80% of platforms fail. To better understand what differentiates failing from successful platforms, we identified 30 platform success factors. These range from corporate value integration, where the platform strategy gets defined and the platform’s value definition, to the platform architecture covering all essential IT considerations and best practices making, e.g., innovation and personalization possible. To make these success factors usable in practice, we integrated all 30 success factors into the wellestablished Business Model Canvas (BMC) widely adopted for business model design. This method was chosen to test the applicability and usefulness of the platform success factors in a widely used vehicle and thus ease our workshop study. The success factors are promising, as demonstrated in our workshop study.