The Platform Design Toolkit 2.0 — just released in Draft and open for comments (in Creative Commons)

3 min readNov 6, 2015

[for the latest release of Platform Design Toolkit check www.platformdesigntoolkit.com]

After a few months of work I released a new version of the Platform Design Toolkit.
The Platform Design Toolkit is a set of design thinking and system modeling canvases to help you design digital and non digital Platforms. Platforms are here intended a tools to help firms access the power that lies in ecosystems and reach objectives that are way beyond their boundaries and potential as a single firm.

You can download all canvases directly from: http://bit.ly/PDT20DraftDowload

The first time I started thinking about developing this Toolkit to help platform designer was in 2013: I was frustrated with using the Business Model Canvas, a tool that — in my opinion — was designed and optimized for an old way of doing businesses: a linear way, that of the industrial mode of production. The BM Canvas indeed implied a “linear” perspective where the business owner creates the value proposition and provides this it to the market, targeting one or many customer segments.

Already at that time, a growing understanding — even in 2013 — was pointing out to how successful companies increasingly started to operate as hubs, developing the ability to “organize” skills, resources and inventories and redesign entire markets from scratch by doing so, with impressive results.
The Platform Design Canvas was awesomely received with more than 150k views and thousands of downloads in few days.

After almost two years of personal use of the kit (in private and public sector, startup and corporate contexts, strategic consulting projects, presentation at conferences, public workshops) and, even more importantly, after two years of receiving independent PDT adopters feedback, I felt it was really time to take the framework back to a research phase for a while. Reading blogs, books and talking long with some of the most brilliant thought leaders in digital transformation and collaborative economy, I collected powerful insights and I put all this knowledge and effort back on the PDT to make it a more powerful and resilient tool with this new version.

The main changes you’ll find in this (2.0) version on the Platform Design Toolkit can be easily listed:

a revision of the type and set of key ecosystem entities you need to model (now including Partners besides Platform Owners, Peers and external Stakeholders)
a bigger set of canvases (now five instead of two)
a broader integration of aspects that go beyond the value production, such as evaluating externalities, platform governance and platform innovation
the possibility to interwork more easily with the Pentagrowth Framework developed by Javi Creus at Ideas for Change

The whole idea behind this 2.0 update is to share with you a tool that helps you design far reaching platforms and more resilient ones — and also to help you rethink some of the key functionings of platforms by understanding the overarching model and being able to envision how the Platform model can be innovated and redefined.