Grand challenges and platform ecosystems: Scaling solutions for wicked ecological and societal problems
Paavo Ritala
kHUB post date: April 9, 2024
Originally published: May 25, 2024 (PDMA JPIM • Vol 41, Issue 2 • March 2024)
Read time: 40 minutes
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The persistence of grand societal and environmental challenges demands attention from innovation management scholars and practitioners to find effective resolutions. Grand challenges are complex, uncertain, and evaluative and cannot be resolved by individual actors or organizations. Therefore, conventional forms of organizing do not suffice in the face of wicked problems like climate change or global inequality, which require continuous and varied attention and inputs. In this catalyst article, I argue that platform ecosystems—communities and groups of actors in different markets orchestrated through a digital platform and driven by combinations of economic and prosocial incentives—are an organizing form that can help effectively scale solutions for grand societal and environmental problems. This potential is based on three organizational elements of platform ecosystems: (1) coordination structures for orchestrating complementary inputs, (2) instigation and maintenance of collective action, and (3) generativity potential. I illustrate these arguments with practical examples of two platforms with the potential to resolve specific grand challenges: Patient Innovation, which orchestrates a community of innovators seeking to help treatment of chronic and rare diseases, and Excess Materials Exchange, which provides matching solutions to address the challenges associated with industrial material waste. The article concludes with an agenda for future research and practice on platform ecosystems and grand challenges.
Practitioner points
- Social and environmental grand challenges need innovative and diverse solutions: Issues like climate change and global inequality are wicked and persisting problems that cannot be easily solved by isolated attempts by individuals or organizations.
- Platform ecosystems can offer scalable solutions: Digital platforms can connect communities and groups across different markets, using a mix of economic and prosocial incentives to help scale solutions for pressing global problems.
- Platform ecosystems are helpful since they enable coordination, collective action, and generativity, as illustrated by successful examples like Patient Innovation (tackling chronic and rare diseases) and Excess Materials Exchange (addressing industrial waste).
- Setting up a digital platform to tackle a specific grand challenge requires experimentation with different incentives, setting up a scalable business case, and continuous maintenance and growth of the ecosystem around the platform.