Towards a Catalogue of Strategy Elements for Specifying a Digital Platform Business Strategy

Digital platforms have become essential in modern society. However, despite their appeal and potential, digital platforms have proven to fail often due to diverse strategic reasons including pricing, timing, competition, trust, openness, critical mass, and network effects. Despite the reported risk of failures, there is a lack of guidelines that support organizations in defining business strategies for digital platforms. In this paper, we address part of this problem. In the study we identify strategic considerations from digital business strategy, platform and multi-sided business strategy literature, and the Balanced Scorecard, and integrate them into a catalogue of nineteen strategy elements. This supports the specification of a coherent set of strategic objectives for a digital platform business strategy. A digital platform business strategy transforms an organization into a collaborative networked organization as four out of five strategy perspectives clearly reflect the need and of interaction with the ecosystem of the organization