Abstract
Platform business models and their underlying technologies are having a transformational impact on the global business landscape. This Schumpeterian disruption is the direct result of international entrepreneurship spanning 40 years from the battle for the industry standard for personal computers in the 1980s to the present day. The chapter analyses the role of entrepreneurs in laying the technological foundations for the growth of the platform business model before undertaking a literature review of business model innovation and the resource-based view (RBV) of technological disruption. This highlights how platform-driven ecosystems have inverted traditional ways of doing business which incumbent firms struggle to emulate. Due to the global nature of the Internet as a technology platform, the chapter will also consider the importance of the born global firm and why traditional one-sided businesses struggle to match the agility and scope of the new age entrepreneurial platform start-ups. This is evidenced by the surge in platform adoption in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
A major portion of the chapter has been part of the author’s dissertation: Walton, N. (2018) The Extent to Which Data-Rich Firms Operating Two-Sided Platform-Ecosystem Business Models Are Able to Use Data to Gain an Innovation Advantage over Established One-Sided Companies. PhD Dissertation: Coventry University. January 2018.
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Walton, N. (2021). Entrepreneurs, Platforms, and International Technology Transformation. In: Jafari-Sadeghi, V., Amoozad Mahdiraji, H., Dana, LP. (eds) Empirical International Entrepreneurship. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68972-8_5
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