Digital platforms have, in the past decades, undergone a revolution, evolving from its technical roots so much that nowadays value is mostly generated, not by the technologies that power platforms, but by the ecosystem of applications, developers and users it is able to generate and support. In this paper, we seek to understand the importance industrial platform owners place on the community building and platform growth components of the platform development process by reviewing 50 Horizon 2020 financed projects that stand on the development of platforms. This evidence is leveraged for the case of a validation strategy definition for a platform ecosystem aiming at sharing production capacity. Key findings point to platform developing practices focused on the development of technical components to the detriment of the ecosystem generation element. We also shed light on how different business models and funding schemes impacted the steering of these platforms.