Introduction: The ‘platformization’ of everyday life

In 2015, Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar, an innovative short-term car rental service, stated, ‘everything that can become a platform will become a platform’ (Chase, 2015). The iconic expression of the American entrepreneur is emblematic of a process of digital transformation that is penetrating every economic sector. Digital platforms have become a pervasive aspect of daily life: booking a restaurant, ordering a taxi, finding accommodation, and so on.

According to Srnicek (2017), a platform is a digital infrastructure that enables interaction between two or more groups of actors, and can be classified into five types: advertising, cloud, industrial, product and lean platforms (such as Uber and Airbnb) that minimize the direct ownership of assets, starting from the workforce. We can also distinguish between platforms that begin as greenfield start-ups based on service innovations, founded by young digital entrepreneurs, and brownfield platforms arising from the digitalization of existing services in a context of process innovation.

According to van Dijck et al (2018), platforms are not a disruptive innovation, as the media and public discourse seem to suggest, but are part of a sort of silent and long-rooted transformation that starts before platforms were invented. They are the last ‘phase’ of a flexibilization trend, where decision-making processes and resources are distributed and shared (albeit often unfairly), so that organizations tend to go far beyond their formal boundaries. Platforms are then boundaryless organizations (Robbins and Coulter, 2009), based on a core central system (not exclusively digital) that engages and coordinates diversified production systems and networks of human and nonhuman cooperators and complementors. The platforms are set up, therefore, with light organizational structures that greatly reduce the relevance of the amount of physical and human capital. According to MIT (2017), as many as 70 per cent of the ‘Largest Global Firms’ top list are platform firms, and just considering Uber, Airbnb and Facebook, they are valued at 60 per cent of the total market cap of the DAX (Deutscher Aktienindex, or German stock index).

The strength of the platform model relies on the peculiarity of its value-extractive strategy.