Digital platforms are a source of both disruption and innovation… think Uber, Alibaba, and eBay. But many people are still not clear what a platform is, and still others hold misconceptions. To counter this, our Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Monica Menghini, debunked three of the biggest myths around platforms.

1.

Myth: Platforms are for business automation.
Reality: In order to be a platform, you need capabilities to manage every single value stream of your industry value creation chain. It must be an operating system for your company. It is the way for you to collaborate and communicate with your value network, and a new way of running your supply chain.

2.

Myth: Point solutions can transform into a platform.
Reality: You can’t just add a few collaborative capabilities to existing solutions and have a platform. Platforms must run and optimize your business processes and your data, and model your business process based on your data coming from any value creation step – from design to engineering to sales and more. You need a holistic system to manage every single value stream. It’s no longer just about offering software; it’s about creating trading networks from where you can reach out to find any service or content that is relevant for your industry.

3.

Myth: Any platform is an innovation platform.
Reality: An innovation platform needs to manage the innovation process, gathering ideas from multiple sources, regardless of location, offering effective tools for collaboration to create the top-notch experiences that today’s consumers demand.

Hear Monica discuss these myths in this short video. She also talks about the emerging platform-based marketplaces that are poised to further transform how companies work with one another. These marketplaces help you reach out and reinvent new supply chain opportunities– it’s no longer about sourcing, it’s about exploring new capabilities in social, networked ways.

Monica concludes her talk with this recommendation: the next time you need to make a decision on getting a new software solution, ask yourself: is this solution capable of managing the innovation model that you need in this century? If the answer is I don’t know, check out the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, designed to create the experiences demanded in today’s economy.