Digital platforms for development: Foundations and research agenda

| Digital platforms as IT artefacts

The technical properties of platforms differ according to their type and purpose. We follow Cusumano et al. (2019) who define platforms according to their principal purpose and identify two broad categories of digital platforms:

transaction platforms and innovation platforms. In what follows, we detail the different types of platforms, we explore their purpose and origins and positioning in the academic literature. We examine their materialities and potentialities as digital artifacts as well, their basis for value creation and capture, and the resulting implications for development. A summary of the characteristics of transaction and innovation platforms is shown in Table 1 below.

1. | Transaction platforms

Purpose and origins

Much research has concentrated on digital platforms as transaction platforms, sometimes referred to as multi-sided markets or exchange platforms. Their main purpose is to facilitate transactions between different organisations, entities and individuals, such as connecting buyers with sellers, recruiters with job seekers and drivers with passengers. The origins of digital platforms in the sense of enabling transactions has its foundations in the boom-bust years of the dot.com era at the cusp of the new millennium. The term ‘platform’ was associated with many of the new startup business models that emerged at this time using internet-based applications facilitating transactions between multiple sides of a market and benefitting from networks effects. Transaction platforms can be further divided according to their principal purpose. These include for example social media platforms (e.g., Facebook – on a global basis), e-commerce (Mercado Libre – originating from Argentina), the ‘gig’ economy platforms (Gojek – originating from Indonesia), platforms built around the notion of the sharing economy (Afristay – originating from South Africa), online portals and app stores (Freebasics – originating from internet.org) and platforms enabling digital identity (Aadhaar – originating from India).