Digital Platform Leadership: Exploring the Role of National Factors, Platform, and Customer Type

Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: 1,3, Technical University of Munich, language: English, abstract: Digital platforms are an ubiquitous phenomenon that threatens incumbent firms. Among digital platform providers, the competition is fierce. Platform giants such as Google, Amazon, or Microsoft strive for platform leadership. The question of how to achieve platform leadership is equally essential for platform companies and incumbent firms transforming into platform business models. This thesis aimed to provide a fundamental building block for the analysis of this question. In the first step, a taxonomy that conceptualizes platforms from a business model perspective was created. In the second part of this thesis, this taxonomy was used to analyze configurations of successful and leading platform business models. This thesis found multiple configurations of platform leaders within an ecosystem-level and firm-level model. The two models extended existing theory on the causal relation of factors on platform leadership.