Evolving a Platform

This chapter explains how a platform owner can orchestrate the evolution of a platform. We begin by describing a bathtub model of innovation stocks and flows and then describe a litmus test for identifying which resources in a platform's ecosystem can give it a competitive advantage. We then describe how dynamic alignment of a platform's architecture and its governance accelerate its evolution. We trace the influence of that alignment and governance on the short, medium, and long term metrics of platform evolution. We first tackle how a platform owner can bolster a platform's resilience, scalability, and composability in the short term, followed by stickiness, synergy, and plasticity in the medium term. We conclude with a discussion of how a platform owner can orchestrate envelopment by a platform while rebuffing envelopment attacks on the platform, ensure a platform's durability, and orchestrate platform mutation in the long run.