Platform companies with the largest user networks offer significant value for consumers. Yet total network size isn’t the only key to competitive advantage; platform users may place equal or greater weight on having access to specific, local, or higher-quality platform users or information about the network or its participants.

There are clear benefits for companies allowing website users to login with social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google. But the ease of user access that social logins make possible comes at a price: The platforms learn a great deal more about users’ buying and searching behavior via these agreements — information that could wind up helping the company’s competitors (including the platform itself) down the line.

Platform companies continue to surprise and challenge conventional approaches to creating value. The 2018 MIT Platform Strategy Summit brought together innovative leaders who are playing a major role in the changing digital economy. Learn from their experience with five major principles for creating new value with platforms.

Each month, the MIT SMR Strategy Forum poses a single question to our panel of experts in the fields of business, economics, and management. This month’s question asks our panel whether ride-sharing platform Uber must develop a self-driving car capability to remain viable in the market.

Blockchain is poised to help media and entertainment companies build innovative business models that offer new monetization strategies for their digital assets and streamline critical business activities.

Platform businesses, like Airbnb or Lyft, often talk about themselves as if they’re merely matchmakers. That’s a smart pitch — when a company is negotiating with investors. But any platform that wants to succeed will have to learn something Airbnb did: Matchmaking isn’t everything. Success also depends on identifying and mitigating risks for your buyers and sellers. The quantity and quality of goods or services bought and sold on your platform will be proportional to the amount of risk mitigated.

When it comes to transformation, many organizations struggle with a dilemma of digital growth happening at the expense of customer satisfaction. By moving to a platform-based approach, companies can align tech investments and new features with the customer experience.

As companies rely more and more on AI-driven chatbots to communicate with customers, they need to consider ways to make computers’ communication and understanding better and more natural.

A strong governance with a steady hand assures that a company achieves a given purpose properly, within the boundaries of ethics and law.

In the wake of documented Russian manipulation of the U.S. election via disinformation campaigns on social media platforms, digital platform companies like Facebook and Twitter need to take concrete steps to prevent misuse.

Companies adopt enterprise social media (ESM) platforms in the hope that employees will reap the benefits of knowledge sharing, collaboration, and efficiency. But the technical and cultural disconnect between ESM and the rest of the internal IT systems and digital platforms that employees use daily means that less than 50% of ESM platforms are actually used by employees on a regular basis.

Executives often look at the network effects of digital platforms as a key source of competitive advantage — without understanding that platforms need to also leverage other factors at play in the local markets and among preferred customers. Network effects can help, but on their own, they offer very limited competitive value.

Although traditional financial services companies now offer mass-market financial advice via “robo-advisers,” average U.S. customers seeking investment advice are still underserved — and platform-based digital powerhouses like Amazon are taking notice.

Business success today requires taking part in open platform ecosystems. But too many world-class product and services companies find their platformization quests narrowly defined, and end up with constricted or conflicted implementations. The ability of information systems and devices to exchange data isn’t enough in and of itself. Instead, developing new capabilities is the key to platform innovation that will add value to an organization.

The emergence of a handful of high-profile virtual monopolies built on digital platforms has directed a huge amount of attention to the network effects such platforms fuel. But not all platforms are equally powerful. There is a reason why Airbnb is a better business than Uber.

A decade ago, Apple’s iPhone cornered the mobile phone market by developing a platform interface that expanded its product from a simple one-task tool to a multitask utility. Using platforms to gain competitive advantage is no longer unique to Apple — it is happening in other industries across the board as readily available platform options grow in number.

Zhang Ruimin, the CEO and chairman of the Qingdao, China, white goods giant Haier Group Corp., has done what most chief executives dare not even dream about. He blew up nearly the entire administrative structure of a global manufacturing enterprise, eliminating the 10,000 management jobs that once held it together, and reshaped the organization into a network of entrepreneurial ventures run by employees.

There’s a great deal of enthusiasm about platform strategies these days. Entrepreneurs pitch their startups as the next Uber, the next Facebook, or the next Airbnb, while executives in established companies are retooling their strategies around platforms to drive growth and compete digitally. But creating a successful platform business is not easy — as economists Richard Schmalensee and David S. Evans explain in this MIT Sloan Management Review interview.

Digital technology has already upended the media and information sectors. It’s about to do the same to the manufacturing economy, and pave the way for what can be called the “pan-industrial” strategy.

Blockchain technology has the potential to transform how businesses are organized and managed. It allows companies to eliminate transaction costs and use outside resources as easily as internal resources. The implications for areas such as accounting, contract negotiation and enforcement, sales and marketing, and capital investment are myriad. Companies should start exploring how this technology could impact their industry and processes.