Digital industrial platforms: a silent revolution?

The success and domination of the digital giants in the business-to-consumer market (B2C) is fascinating and worrying at the same time. Faced with these giants, some more traditional companies have also chosen to adopt a strategy of ‘platformisation’. Even though it remains discrete, a similar strategy is emerging in industrial sectors (B2C). Is an ecosystem – which can be characterised either by more transparency between the elements and categories of data in the same industrial sector, or when production, commercialisation and innovation are grouped together – necessarily synonymous with better performance, better use of existing resources, and better division of wealth between those involved? This debate draws its inspiration from three case studies, and explains how these transformations co-exist and operate in a heightened competitive environment.