The Changing Nature of Value Creation in a Data-Rich World: Platforms, Ecosystems and Value Networks and the Impact on Organisational Design and Configurations.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how the rise of Internet-based platform businesses such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba and Tencent (and many others) is changing the value creation models across a broad range of markets and industrial sectors. The paper explains how the unique two-sided configuration and asset light structures to these new data-rich companies are disrupting traditional single-sided firms and the inability of these firms to respond due to core rigidities and the absence of strategic flexibility.

These non-linear networked platform companies are proving to be more efficient and effective at delivering products and services across a broad range of economic sectors due to their ability to reduce transaction costs using digitised products and Big Data analytics. This raises the question of how incumbent firms should respond since their existing resources and capabilities and structural configurations are being rendered obsolete. These problems will be exacerbated as new technologies come on stream such as the Internet-of-Things (IOT) and artificial intelligence (AI).