Digital platforms challenges and opportunities : Evidence from a traditional market sector

Digital platforms are becoming more and more established in the current digital age and with it come many new business ideas, models and more. This has lead to several disciplines and industries taking an interest in them and sought to build one themselves. However, little is known about how the context of a digital platform can affect its launch. Existing research todays focuses on general strategies for launching a platform but we argue that context matters and that it changes the challenges and opportunities for the platform. This thesis aims to fill this gap for traditional industries that faces different kinds of challenges compared to more IT established areas. To achieve this, we took part of a case study and conducted a qualitative data collection process consisting of interviews with project members of The Omega project. We were able to identify a set of challenges and opportunities presented to the project: diversity, organizational, and culture to name a few. Based on our findings we could conclude that digital platforms for traditional industries comes with its own set of challenges and opportunities but that these can be used to find similarities to other industries to help tackle them. Therefore, we suggest further research to be done on how the context affects the challenges and opportunities in other industries