Some interesting comments by Annabelle Gawer in Infoworld’s Forum on Platform Leadership. Gawer is the co-author of the book “Platform Leadership”, which I’ve been reading.
– Platform leaders are firms that lead and drive innovation in their industry, by stimulating complementary innovations performed by other firms.
– The most important thing is that the corporate executive leaders would be aware of just how interdependent many industries are — and that the market is full of innovative firms that can add value to your product. The trick is to be able to tap into the innovative capabilities of a while industry, without having to internalize all innovative effort.
– Platform leaders understand strategy at two levels: the level of their own firm, and the more encompassing level of industry — and they constantly need to formulate and implement and evaluate their strategies at these 2 levels.
– Broadening the focus, and tap into external innovation requires innovation internally, and being able to drive innovation across the industry as well — so the vision and understanding of where the industry is going is not enough — one has to have the internal capabilities to innovate internally as well.
– Gawer’s Thesis on Platform Leadership (PDF, 364 pages)
My context: we have to build Emergic into a platform. I wrote about this recently in Platform Permavantage.
