Platform Economy

What is Platform Economy?

Platform economy is a term that refers to the current transition that the most valuable companies in the world are making from mainly offering products to mainly offering platforms. A true platform economy is fast and flexible, and is enabled by digitalization technologies and capabilities.


Digital Innovations Giving Birth to Disruptive Digital Platform Economies

Previously, the most valuable companies in the world offered products and were in multiple industries, including automakers, manufacturers, oil and gas companies and brick-and-mortar retailers. Over the past decade digital innovation has caused many valuable companies from various industries to shift from a products based model to technology driven platforms with multiple offerings. Consumer platform services are more commonly known for use in streaming, rideshares and ecommerce. Business-to-business platform services may include software-as-a-service, or SaaS. 


The transition from a product-based economy to a platform economy will be complete when the majority of manufacturers master two things:

  • The incorporation of digital twins into their products and processes, which allows them to gather and analyze connected data that will allow them to fully optimize how they work, and

  • When companies offer digital services rather than products via a pervasive computing Internet of Things (IoT) platform that allows for the gathering and analysis of large amounts of data.
Discovering Platform Economy Through Siemens Digital Innovation

Siemens Digital Innovation Platform

Virtualizing Your World Through Siemens Digital Twin

Build a precise virtual model of a product or production lifecyle and their assets.
  • Economy platforms are dependent on collaboration and community connectivity
  • Through open and collaborative environments you are able to identify and capitalize on current and emerging disruptive industry trends.
  • Application development for product design, manufacturing, and analysis

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Learn how IoT brings performance data for closed loop innovation

Digital Twin

The concept of the digital twin was introduced over two decades ago. Today’s technology now makes it possible to feed operational data back into the complete value chain, creating the opportunity to continuously optimize both product design and production activities in a closed-loop decision-making process that touches all three components – the product digital twin, the production digital twin, and the performance digital twin.