Designing Digital Platforms: A Synthetization of Relevant Design Topics for Business Models from a Literature Review

Digital platforms (DPs) represent a challenging research object. In this context, scientific literature has produced a large number of publications studying DPs. Given the importance of designing DPs in both academia and practice, the purpose of this study is to synthesize the current research findings on DPs and provide a framework with possible design topics under consideration from a business model perspective. A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted to identify and synthesize the relevant findings. We analyzed 22 publications published before May 2021. The analysis shows that, in terms of "Value Propositions", most design topics were identified. In contrast, only one design topic was identified for "Customer Relationships", "Customer Segments", and "Cost Structure". In sum, our results present a framework with design topics for DPs and support the alignment of further research. Practitioners receive an overview of design topics for DPs that encourage today`s digital transformation projects

Comparing digital platform types in the platform economy

In the domain of the platform economy we identified two gaps in the current literature. First the lack of a shared conceptualization of digital platform types. We solve this issue with a taxonomy giving an overview of digital platform attributes, with attribute values expressing the possible variations between platforms depending on their type. These attributes and attribute values are then used in the typology giving a clear overview of all the digital platform types and how they are related to each other. The second gap is the lack of knowledge concerning the software functionalities of digital platforms. We contribute to this with a proposal of a reference ontology allowing for a better communication between developers and other stakeholders. Our envisioned ontology can be used as a common language that all platform stakeholders can understand to facilitate future research and support ontology-driven development of digital platforms

A reference architecture for customizable marketplaces

A broader term used for a platform in the sharing economy is 'marketplace'. This is a type of e-commerce site or app where transactions for services of-fered by multiple providers are processed by the marketplace operator (e.g. Uber, Airbnb, eBay). Lately the number and popularity of marketplaces has exploded, with more variety and focus on niche markets. Software products like Sharetribe make it possible to create a customized marketplace quick and with few resources. It is, however, not known whether such products cater for the needs of all possible varieties of marketplace, nor how such products can be selected and/or customized to provide the best fit with a particular marketplace. The goal of this PhD project is to design a Software Reference Architecture (SRA) for marketplaces which can be used to select or create the most suitable software product. Our first step in the project is to design a conceptual data model for this SRA based on a marketplace do-main ontology