THE PLATFORM AS AN ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION FOR COMPLEX SYSTEMS

Platforms are heterogenous and fungible infrastructures that combine technological and organizational elements, and that are diffused and adopted in a wide array of industrial, technological and social systems. Platforms are emerging as a major organizational innovation in contemporary capitalism, a novel step in the path of organizational forms triggered by technological change that characterized key discontinuities in the coordination of economic activities, such as the rise of the large integrated firm, the success of lean production and the upsurge of networks. Platforms build upon the new opportunities provided by ICTs to improve the generation, exploitation and coordination of both intangible and physical assets, on the demand and supply side. Platforms are critical organizational innovations that support the mobilization and integration of complementary resources in the generation of new products, as well as their adoption and acquisition by users and consumers. As such platforms can be considered an organizational innovation induced and made possible by technological innovations, similarly to those organizational innovations described by Alfred Chandler (1990), James Womack (Womack, Jones and Roos, 1990) and Walter Powell (Powell and Padget, 2012) that spread thoroughly the XX century.