Platform Talent: Jobs & Skills for the Age of Networks — with Peter C. Evans

Podcast Notes

In this episode, we speak to Dr Peter C. Evans, Managing Partner at the Platform Strategy Institute and co-founder of the advisory firm Enterprise Sound Strategy.

Peter holds a PhD from MIT and is co-chair of the MIT Platform Strategy Summit. He has over 20 years of experience leading teams in identifying, assessing, and communicating high-priority marketplace trends and disruptions to shape effective business strategy, innovation and investment.

He has specialized in helping companies anticipate key market trends, develop strategic responses as craft seminal thought leadership that frames and articulates the need for change.

We were curious to talk to Peter about the concept of “platform talent” and what companies are looking for when it comes to recruiting leaders in platform strategy and development. Peter talks us through some of the key insights from the latest study by the Platform Strategy Institute — exploring among other things the key roles covered by the notion “platform talent”.

He explains how sometimes recruiters themselves don’t fully understand exactly what they’re looking for, and that it was the still rather incomplete understanding of the market for platform talent that drew his attention to this “white space” of the platform economy in the first place.

To find out more about Peter’s work:

• Website: https://platformstrategyinstitute.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-c-evans-phd-217b8/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/pevans_c

Other references and mentions:

• MIT Platform Strategy Summit: http://ide.mit.edu/events/2020-mit-platform-strategy-summit
• Keynote from the MIT Platform Strategy Summit 2020 by the summit co-chairs Peter C. Evans, Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne: https://youtu.be/CUQaqMILuKQ
• Peter C. Evans and Annabelle Gawer, The Rise of the Platform Enterprise: A Global Survey, Center for Global Enterprise, 2016: https://www.thecge.net/app/uploads/2016/01/PDF-WEB-Platform-Survey_01_12.pdf
• Peter Evans, Cross-Platform Integrations: Why ExxonMobil and Bandsintown Should Do a Deal, 2020: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cross-platform-integrations-why-exxonmobil-should-do-deal-evans-phd/
• Peter Evans and Joseph Pine, Experience Platforms: Finding New Strategic Value in Today’s Experience Economy:https://platformstrategyinstitute.com/experience-platforms/
• Microsoft, Automation Anywhere: https://www.automationanywhere.com/solutions/microsoft-azure-rpa-automation
• Bands in Town: https://www.bandsintown.com/

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at: https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 22 September 2020

Key Insights

1. The Platform Talent study undertaken by Peter and the Platform Strategy Institute identifies three categories of firms looking for Platform Talent: “replenishers” (existing platforms needing new people); builders (startups that have reached an inflection point), and; the biggest category, what you might call incumbents. One example would be the recruitment of John Donahoe, who previously was the CEO of eBay, to fill the president and CEO position in the incumbent company Nike, looking for somebody who could drive their platform strategy.

2. Platform Talent covers a broad set of roles and skills, from deep technical knowledge, to being able to work across the organization to create buy-in around the strategy and the roadmap, to building the ecosystem (the “community of the inverted firm”) where you’re creating value outside the boundaries of the firm. So, you need people — a platform team — that are astutely familiar with platform strategy, and all the elements of platform product management, ecosystem management, platform engineering. The most recent addition to the Platform Talent roles, they found to be around privacy and compliance. Glancing into the future, Peter also thinks hiring people who have an eye for understanding cross-platform integrations will be an important Platform Talent, because it can open up huge new opportunities for companies to generate revenue and serve customers.

3. For the platform economy to realize its full potential, the question of upskilling, and educating the next generation of Platform Talent is a hot one, and there seems to be currently more demand than supply of platform talent. At the same time, we’re seeing on the one hand that education itself is getting “platformized”, and people can design their own upskilling programmes through different online learning modules. On the other hand, the system of credentials and badges is currently a bit of a “mishmash”, whereas a good badging system that can demonstrate that a platform professional with certain technical and managerial skills will perform better and be more effective will help organizations to stand out.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organizing by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.