Development of a Morphology for the Description of Business Models for Technology Platforms

Abstract

The importance of technology platforms as coherent networks of resources, capabilities and competencies is steadily increasing in technology-based companies. The reason is that technology platforms support companies to cope with one of today's most critical organizational complexity topics; that is, the balance between the conflicting priorities of fulfilling the increasing customer demand for individualized innovation while generating company-wide technological synergies. Thus, the business success of technology-based companies can be affected to a significant extent by the development of technology platforms and a consistent description of their business models. That means describing their structural design, in order to ensure technology platform-related, commercial opportunities. In practice however, the structural design of technology platforms is often poorly described and technology platform-related, commercial opportunities are not fully utilized. The reason is mainly due to the fact that there is no established opinion about a consistent framework, which supports the systematic derivation of the constitutional and configurable dimensions of a technology platform. Therefore, in this paper we develop a morphology that defines and characterizes the dimensions of technology platforms, in order to enable the description of business models in the context of technology platforms.

Strategy framework for technology platforms within the context of diversified companies

“…In academia and practice, the term technology platform has been used inconsistently in the past [6,13]. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a clear definition for the purpose of this paper.…”

“…The activities of a technology platform focus on the technology management process and mainly on its cross-functional activities of technology intelligence, technology planning, technology development and technology exploitation [7,13]. Technology intelligence is selected, when the technological knowledge as well as the intended market scope is relatively new and the need to gather further information is prevalent, e.g.…”

“…Technology intelligence is selected, when the technological knowledge as well as the intended market scope is relatively new and the need to gather further information is prevalent, e.g. in form of technology scouting projects or market studies [13,26]. Technology planning is chosen in case of already available knowledge and access to technologies and markets.…”

“…Technology planning is chosen in case of already available knowledge and access to technologies and markets. Future projects are specified and visualized mostly in form of technology roadmaps, linking the product and technology level [7,13,27]. Technology development is focusing on the creation of technological knowledge and often linked to the product development and application scenarios [6,22,28].…”

“…The relevant technology experts of a technology platform realize internally the operational platform activities [7,19,20]. The technology platform manager on the other hand is in charge of the coordination and supervision of the operational platform activities [7,13]. The manager consolidates the work and input of the participating technology experts and communicates the results to the decision makers.…”