The Rise and Maturation of the Platform Economy

The Next Phase in the Digital Revolution: Platforms, Abundant Computing; Growth and Employment

John Zysman
Martin Kenney
2016

This report argues that computer-intensive automation (CIAutomation) is likely to change the nature of work and manufacturing value creation in the emerging Platform Economy. The industrial and service changes based on low-cost computation, as they become more generalized, may reverse Robert Gordon’s observations about the slowing growth in productivity. However, the increased adoption of CIAutomation also poses profound dilemmas for society that revolve around whether this automation will be used to solely to replace workers or can be integrated into production of goods and services in...

Marketplace Rules and International Deal Making: Some thoughts about the implications of the TPP

John Zysman
2016

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, TPP, is not strictly a trade and investment deal. Of course, TPP is a strategic bargain and not just a political economy arrangement. More importantly though, it is ultimately a broadly gauged bargain about critical rules of the market. These include rules, as examples, for information technology, Intellectual Property, and the environment. As international trade deals increasingly become entangled with the domestic regulation of the economy, although they always were, the treaty implications for market rules must be considered - what the rules are, how they...

A Platform Firm Flexport: Benefitting from its cluster and the globalization of production

Kelsey Hutcherson
2016

The transportation and logistics sector is being transformed by the Internet. Roughly $8.3 trillion is spent on logistics every year globally but the industry still relies on faxing papers, spreadsheets, and other means of organizing and keeping track of shipments. However, entrepreneurs have been launching firms meant to “platformize” the shipping industry. In this paper, I analyze a recently formed San Francisco firm, Flexport, a company developing a platform to reinvent global logistics. Flexport is among many other companies in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco area that using new...

Certification, Clusters, and Creativity: An Analysis of Etsy as a Platform Firm

Kara Hawkins
2016

With the continuous advances in manufacturing methods, shipping options, and digital communication, domestic and global markets have become inundated with cheap, mass produced items and goods. This ‘race to the bottom’ has led to a consumer culture where customers and firms have steadily demanded lower and lower prices, leading to even more aggressive pushes in outsourced and offshored work, re-locating of production to lower wage countries, and stricter time limits on shipping. Resulting goods offered in the market are typically cheaply made and of lower quality, which has in turn re-...

The Regulation of Labor Platforms: The Politics of the Uber Economy

Ruth Berins Collier
Veena Dubal
Christopher Carter
2017

Since 2012, the platform economy has experienced stunning growth. While this growth can be measured in terms of the capitalization of platform companies or their gross revenue, a particularly relevant metric is the participation rate of those who earn money on the platform. It has been estimated that monthly participation grew 10-fold from October 2012 to September 2015. While this participation constitutes only 1 percent of adults in the United States, the cumulative participation rate reached 4.2 percent by the end of that period. For labor platforms, which are of particular interest in...

Intelligent Tools and Digital Platforms: Implications for Work and Employment

John Zysman
Martin Kenney
2017

The rise of digital platforms leads to a number of challenges: Will the rapid introduction of intelligent tools and systems1 provide real and rising incomes with reasonable levels of equality and growth built on sustained productivity generated by the new technology and strategies? Or will it provoke a world of increasing unemployment and inequality? Will...

The Rise of the Platform Economy

Martin Kenney
John Zysman
2016
The application of big data, new algorithms, and cloud computing will change the nature of work and the structure of the economy. But the exact nature of that change will be determined by the social, political, and business choices we make. Click here to access the full article.

Global Competitors? Mapping the Internationalization Strategies of Chinese Digital Platform Firms

Kai Jia
Martin Kenney
John Zysman
2018

The recent emergence of Chinese digital platform firms, whose size rivals that of the US platform giants, has attracted much popular interest. Given the size and increasing technical sophistication of these firms, there has been increasing interest in whether they have developed sufficient capacities and resources to become global-class competitors for the reigning US platform giants. The authors assembled a database of all overseas operations of the Chinese platform firms. Nine of them have foreign operations, with Tencent and Alibaba being the most important offshore investors. The...

Employment, Work, and Value Creation in the Era of Digital Platforms

Martin Kenney
Petri Rouvinen
John Zysman
2019

This paper considers the implications of the increasing adoption of digital platforms for work and value creation. To do this we develop a taxonomy not of types of platforms but the types of work and value creation. In this way, we show that platforms are far more prevalent and structuring of societal value creation than most of the literature indicates. To confirm this we introduce a taxonomy of work and value creation in the platform economy.

Our taxonomy defines main groups into which one can separate individuals creating value for the digital platforms. Although our focus is...

Entrepreneurial Finance in the Platform Economy Era

Martin Kenney
John Zysman
2018

Venture financing, a form of entrepreneurial finance, has played a central part in the story of the digital revolution. Indeed, Silicon Valley, the global center of the venture capital industry, draws its name from the substrate of the contemporary semiconductor, which is the computational engine for all digital products. The continuing performance improvements characteristic of Moore’s Law provided ever new potentialities for new generations of startups. While improvement in processing power was the core engine for this venture capital-financed entrepreneurship, the new firms were not...