Project DEMO -- Digital Platform Enterprise #
Funded through Europpean Comission Erasmus+ KA203
Start date: 01/2022
End date: 12/2024
Funding budget: 171,538 €
Project partners #
- Technical University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
- Technical University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria
- University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
- MIDOR Digital Services, Sibiu, Romania
- TU Wien, Vienna, Austria
Project outline #
During the last two decades the biggest business transformation was that digitalisation has enabled new forms of collaboration and value-provision by transiting from individual enterprises to digital platform enterprises. Resources are harnessed by opening the platform enterprise boundaries and providing an innovation space for third-parties to create add-on offerings as well as through the exploitation of network effects.
During the last decade different start-ups have emerged in Europe as potential digital platform enterprises, showing technical leadership. However, those companies who have developed very successfully have sold a share of their business at early stages to US investors.
While technical competences and highly skilled young graduates are available, the European Commission’s Expert Group for the Observatory of Online Platform Economy, finds in their final report that there are two main barriers in establishing successful platform enterprises in Europe: (a) risk capital, and (b) competences and skills in scaling up platform enterprises.
Competences necessary for scaling up include a thorough understanding of digital product-service-systems, leveraging network effects and networks as an organisational form, harnessing communities instead of curating customers as well as optimizing the digital enterprise architecture to generate innovative business models. With the establishment of technologies like 5G and IoT, the market share of digital platform enterprises is expected to increase massively during the next 20 years.
In this context the DEMO project proposes the development of an innovative Digital Platform Enterprise Management Module aiming to equip future graduates with the necessary basic competences for scaling up technological European businesses.