Disruptive Platforms

It has taken platforms only twenty years to become digital economy hubs. They have changed markets, enterprises, and society. They have expedited communication, collaboration, and trade for consumers, winning their attention and collecting their data. In doing so, they have made processes, products, and industries obsolete, and disrupted the expectations and behaviours of market players. This raises the question, are digital platforms global innovators or disruptive monopolists? Are they a solution to problems of the past or emissaries of a problematic future? This book provides a multi-faceted approach to platforms and their profound impact on markets and ecosystems. Economic, managerial, social, and political aspects are analysed, and the differentiation of platforms and their disruptive potential is reviewed. The book also examines the mechanism of achieving a monopolistic position, including in the international supply chain, and the greater influence of platforms on political activity and contemporary democracy. With examples from Poland, USA, and China, the contributions offer an international evaluation of disruptive platforms across a multitude of industries. The edited collection, prepared by scholars from the SGH Warsaw School of Economics, will be valuable to researchers and academics across the fields of strategic management, marketing, innovations, international business, and the digital economy.

This book provides an overview of the opportunities and risks of digitalisation and the platforms that embody it and constitute society's new infrastructure. From a management point of view – defined here as the steering of organised and finalised collective action – understanding this major socio-technical disruption is paramount. The book helps to comprehend its main players, such as the American GAFAM, their power and its sources, their architecture, and their impact on different industries and professions, labour markets, companies, and education. Responding to the dominance of tech giants, numerous initiatives are striving to regulate their influence, safeguard democratic sovereignty, promote fair competition in the digital sphere, and employ frugal digitalisation methods to counteract detrimental aspects of these “oligopolistic” platforms. In essence, shouldn't the overarching aim of digitalisation be to foster community development, strengthen individual and collective capabilities, and preserve the environment, while producing goods and services to meet shared societal interests? Throughout the four sections of this book and its 16 chapters, actors in the digital process and/or academics provide analyses and illustrations of the great digital transformation, examining the ways in which socio-technical advances can be created or used for the benefit of all, while avoiding major risks.

It has taken platforms only twenty years to become digital economy hubs. They have changed markets, enterprises, and society. They have expedited communication, collaboration, and trade for consumers, winning their attention and collecting their data. In doing so, they have made processes, products, and industries obsolete, and disrupted the expectations and behaviours of market players. This raises the question, are digital platforms global innovators or disruptive monopolists? Are they a solution to problems of the past or emissaries of a problematic future? This book provides a multi-faceted approach to platforms and their profound impact on markets and ecosystems. Economic, managerial, social, and political aspects are analysed, and the differentiation of platforms and their disruptive potential is reviewed. The book also examines the mechanism of achieving a monopolistic position, including in the international supply chain, and the greater influence of platforms on political activity and contemporary democracy. With examples from Poland, USA, and China, the contributions offer an international evaluation of disruptive platforms across a multitude of industries. The edited collection, prepared by scholars from the SGH Warsaw School of Economics, will be valuable to researchers and academics across the fields of strategic management, marketing, innovations, international business, and the digital economy.

The proliferation of entrepreneurship, technological and business innovations, emerging social trends and lifestyles, employment patterns, and other developments in the global context involve creative destruction that transcends geographic and political boundaries and economic sectors and industries. This creates a need for an interdisciplinary exploration of disruptive technologies, their impacts, and their implications for various stakeholders widely ranging from government agencies to major corporations to consumer groups and individuals. Disruptive Technology: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a vital reference source that examines innovation, imitation, and creative destruction as critical factors and agents of socio-economic growth and progress in the context of emerging challenges and opportunities for business development and strategic advantage. Highlighting a range of topics such as IT innovation, business strategy, and sustainability, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, business executives, business professionals, academicians, and researchers interested in strategic decision making using innovations and competitiveness.

A different kind of matchmaker. Many of the most dynamic public companies, from Alibaba to Facebook to Visa, and the most valuable start-ups, such as Airbnb and Uber, are matchmakers that connect one group of customers with another group of customers. Economists call matchmakers multisided platforms because they provide physical or virtual platforms for multiple groups to get together. Dating sites connect people with potential matches, for example, and ride-sharing apps do the same for drivers and riders. Although matchmakers have been around for millennia, they’re becoming more and more popular—and profitable—due to dramatic advances in technology, and a lot of companies that have managed to crack the code of this business model have become today’s power brokers. Don’t let the flashy successes fool you, though. Starting a matchmaker is one of the toughest business challenges, and almost everyone who tries to build one, fails. In Matchmakers, David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, two economists who were among the first to analyze multisided platforms and discover their principles, and who’ve consulted for some of the most successful platform businesses in the world, explain how matchmakers work best in practice, why they do what they do, and how entrepreneurs can improve their chances for success. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, an investor, a consumer, or an executive, your future will involve more and more multisided platforms, and Matchmakers—rich with stories from platform winners and losers—is the one book you’ll need in order to navigate this appealing but confusing world.

Technologies shape who we are, how we organize our societies and how we relate to nature. For example, social media challenges democracy; artificial intelligence raises the question of what is unique to humans; and the possibility to create artificial wombs may affect notions of motherhood and birth. Some have suggested that we address global warming by engineering the climate, but how does this impact our responsibility to future generations and our relation to nature? This book shows how technologies can be socially and conceptually disruptive and investigates how to come to terms with this disruptive potential. Four technologies are studied: social media, social robots, climate engineering and artificial wombs. The authors highlight the disruptive potential of these technologies, and the new questions this raises. The book also discusses responses to conceptual disruption, like conceptual engineering, the deliberate revision of concepts.

The book addresses the prevalent digital transformation and focuses on its significant disruption in healthcare. In light of the distinctive characteristics and evolution of the Chinese healthcare industry, private multi-sided platform (MSP) companies emerge to offer novel values and explore the industry value chain. Drawing on the management and economics literature of MSPs, this book examines the selected Chinese MSPs and compares them with the counterpart MSPs in the U.S. This analysis highlights how the unfolding healthcare disruption is valuable for both scholars and practitioners to understand the trends and to take effective actions. “Disruptive Innovation through Digital Transformation: Multi-Sided Platforms of E-Health in China” provides readers in the developing and developed countries with insights on how to approach the current multi-sided platform and to resolve the current problems to better serve customers and patients in the healthcare market.

With the increasing pace of disruptive innovation, the world in general and governments in particular are experiencing challenges in adapting their systems to these new technologies. While the focus is on disruptive industries, these innovations also disrupt how governments regulate industries and technologies. The regulatory and policy choices governments and other regulatory bodies make have a profound impact on the industry by decreasing or magnifying uncertainty. Many of these disruptive technologies offer opportunities and challenges to the way governments interact in their communities. Government Response to Disruptive Innovation: Perspectives and Examinations presents research and case studies on government responses to disruptive innovations from a wide array of countries. It addresses the effects on the development of these innovations as a result of responses governments make. Covering topics such as citizen partnerships, communication technology development, and government action, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for legal professionals, activists, government officials, sociologists, business leaders and executives, students and educators of higher education, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

This comprehensive and judicious Research Handbook examines the fundamental influence of the emergence of contemporary disruptive technologies, including artificial intelligence, online platforms, the internet of things, and social robots, on Human Resource Management (HRM).

Because it continually implements entrepreneurial creativity and innovative business models, the economic landscape is ever-changing in today’s globalized world. As consumers become more willing to accept new strategic trends, this has led to the emergence of disruptive technologies. Since this equipment has an insufficient amount of information and high risks, it is necessary to assess the potential of disruptive technologies in the commercial environment. Impact of Disruptive Technologies on the Sharing Economy provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of disruptive technologies and knowledge-based entrepreneurial efforts and applications within management, business, and economics. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as consumer ethics, corporate governance, and insurance issues, this book is ideally designed for IT specialists, IT consultants, software developers, computer engineers, managers, executives, managing directors, students, professors, scientists, professionals, industry practitioners, academicians, and researchers seeking current research on the consequences of disruptive technologies.