Platforms, Digitization, AI, and the Design of Modern Firms and Business Models

We are living through a transformation of economic organization as deep as the rise of the modern corporation a century ago. Digitization, platforming, datafication, and now artificial intelligence are dissolving the boundaries of the firm and changing who creates value and how. Production that once happened inside large integrated firms increasingly runs across loosely-coordinated ecosystems of outside actors; data and algorithms are becoming the operating core of organizations rather than a feature bolted on top; and the same forces are remaking not only business but science, media, and public life. Platforms have been the leading edge of this shift — and they are where I have done most of my research — but the shift itself is much bigger than platforms. It is a reorganization of economic activity, and it is far from finished.

My courses are built around a set of tools designed for exactly these gaps — frameworks distilled from research, each a precise answer to a problem the inherited toolkit cannot handle. To design value with precision: User × Use-Case × Dimensions of Value, and Value Curves that go beyond Porter. To decide how to organize each side of a platform: the four models — markets, contests, communities, and networks — and open-versus-closed treated as a make-or-buy decision. To build advantage that lasts: VRIDO, and a hard-nosed account of where network effects help and where they don't. To get a platform off the ground: coaxing versus coordinating to crack the chicken-and-egg problem, and a clear-eyed read of when a market actually tips. To analyze competition as it now is — layer against layer and ecosystem against ecosystem, not firm against firm — Ecosystem Forces, the framework that takes managers beyond Porter's Five Forces. And to put AI in its proper place: the Prediction Factory, which locates where data and algorithms create durable advantage — on the premise that the model is the least critical part. Students do not just discuss these. They use them — designing platforms, building working AI prototypes, and competing in simulations.