Digital Platforms have radically disrupted societies and economies. Platform companies such as Amazon, Uber, Udemy, Airbnb have grown significantly faster than anyone else in their sector. While the innovative model of aggregation and disintermediation have progressed private businesses, the large part of society is left untouched by these innovations.
Based on our experience of custom-building and deploying digital platforms in the social space, we have found that platform models are equally applicable in the societal space. To name just a few areas of impact, they can help reduce inequality, provide livelihood to a billion people, make a positive impact on climate, and make citizens engage deeply with societal issues!
Large scale impact requires not only building the right solutions, but also discovering the conditions that drive adoption. When it comes to Social Platforms, such conditions are relatively harder to create. What makes it still important to pursue platform models is that once the critical mass is built, platforms have the ability to build strong network effects. More stakeholders bring in more resources and the ecosystem eventually reaches a stage of sustainability, with little or no external support.
Reaching such a stage however requires large amount of cash, content, collaboration, and most importantly patience to bring in the multiple stakeholder types on the same page. They then need to be handheld till we reach a tipping point.
As Yvon Chouinard from Patagonia says, “If we have any hope of a thriving planet— much less a business— it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have. This is what we can do.”
And this is what we do at Platform Commons!
We build digital platforms for societal problems. We co-create these platforms with communities, markets, civil societies, and governments. Post validation, we deploy them at scale with our partner network. We refine these platforms with cutting edge technology, content and networking principles, and we build pathways to reach a tipping point where it truly becomes a public asset.
Our platforms are today serving about 5 million beneficiaries in the space of Agriculture, Education, Civic Engagement, and we are launching a Climate Platform soon.
