When we talk about platforms, we often mention the big known names...Aribnb, Uber, Facebook and the various tech giants. What if I told you that to talk about platforms I want to use Iron Man, Captain America and Hulk? Let's try. I'm talking about three of the main characters of the movie that - after more than 20 years - removed James Cameron from the top of the list of the highest-grossing movies in history that he led first with Titanic and then with Avatar. I'm talking about the main characters of The Avengers: Endgame, the last choral chapter of the Infinity Saga of the Marvel Cinematic Universe opened in 2008 with Iron Man and closed in 2019 with Spider Far from Home. 23 movies that have grossed more than 22 billion dollars, enriching Disney who acquired the MCU in 2014. Why do we talk about super-heroes to study platforms? The answer is simple. In 2008, the first Iron Man was released, followed by The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America. All these movies have been very successful, but none as much as The Avengers, the first collective movie that brought together in the same movie all the protagonists of the previous ones, all sufficiently independent but linked by subtle details that are building a larger figure. A bit like in product platforms, all of the early Avengers movies worked from independent modules to create a basic architecture that became clear with the first Avengers. The returns are clear. We go from the 585 billion dollars of the first Iron Man, the highest grosser of the first phase until the release of Iron Man 2 that reaches 623 to the 1.5 billion dollars of the first Avengers. It is clear that we are dealing with a structure capable of amplifying the returns, as if all the viewers who have seen even just a few of those films were interested in the big event that sees them all reunited. The results continue to raise the trend line, up to reach almost 2.8 billion dollars of the last The Avengers: Endgame. From a platform perspective, however, something even more interesting has happened. Choral movies, such as for example Captain America: Civil War has been used to introduce new characters, such as for example Black Panther. His first movie reached the incredible gross of $1.3 billion, surpassing every superhero launch movie and nearly tripling the value of the first Iron Man. In other words, the initial group of superheroes, the basic architecture, was used to launch a new strand, a new product...in short, a new superhero, just as we might do in an innovation platform. And the surprises aren't over, in 2021 Marvel Cinematic Universe also expanded on other fronts, launching TV series such as WandaVision or Loki via the Disney + platform, with a not insignificant effect on new subscriptions. This last element reinforces the parallelism with another type of platform, the multi-sided ones that on the one hand tend to have broadly increasing returns after reaching the "critical mass", as we have seen with the movies after The Avengers, but also a modular structure that lends itself to lateral growth, as we have seen with Black Panther or with TV series such as WandaVision. Clearly, the parallels with traditional types of platforms are only partial. Unlike product platforms, the components - the first movies- are very profitable stand-alone products. Unlike innovation platforms, we do not have cross-side network externalities, but we do have a virtuous cycle Unlike transactional platforms we don't have a chicken and egg paradox, since the initial launch is done through traditional products These similarities and differences with platform definitions confront us with a strong awareness. Beyond formal definitions, platform logics - or to use the title of this course, platform thinking - can help us create great products and great services. For the sake of compactness, we've given a name to the type of strategy adopted by Marvel: the Knowledge Platform Strategy. A “knowledge platform strategy” is an approach that may help managers in rethinking the development process. In a creative industry it means that a set of characters, storylines and places can be built through various stand-alone products (in this case movies, more broadly products) creating a knowledge base upon which future content will be built on. Their links offer the common chance to build common collective products (like The Avengers) that exploit the value of the interest collected with all the single components. Then, the platform can be exploited by using it to launch new streams, new sets of characters, storylines and places that will become part of the common ground of the platform and help it enter a virtuous cycle that lets it expand in various directions. We've seen this strategy applied to cinema, we can easily think of it in other creative industries...and maybe it's not so far from some product ecosystems, like the case of Apple. Why not use it as a possible strategy for creating new forms of platforms in other worlds as well? After all…I was mentioning Disney +, which is clearly a platform thinking initiative, taking the netire catalogue that Disney owns, putting it on a digital space available through a fixed subscription…and use it to launch new products and entering in the new competitive arena of streaming services. Is this by chance or Disney is going through platform thinking as well? One final note. In our research on the world of super-heroes we also tried to study the strategies implemented by DC, which has only recently begun to tie the various movies together, and by the X-Men series which is based on a traditional thematic structure. From a statistical point of view we found a correlation between the box office results of the three sagas and the density of their network of links between the films....proxy of their being a platform. That the success of Iron Man and colleagues can be explained by platforms?
