Platform Thinking, Legacy Firms, and the Power of GenAI: An Interview with Daniel Trabucchi and Tommaso Buganza, authors of ‘The Digital Phoenix Effect’
What happens when legacy companies stop trying to copy Silicon Valley and instead start leveraging their own unique assets to create platforms? And what if artificial intelligence could become a strategic thinking partner along the way?
We explore these questions with Daniel Trabucchi and Tommaso Buganza, professors at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano and co-founders of the Platform Thinking HUB. Their work over the past decade has contributed significantly to the development of Platform Thinking as a practical mindset for innovation—and not just for startups. Today, they lead one of Europe’s most active research ecosystems on platform strategy, design, and transformation.
Their new book, The Digital Phoenix Effect: How Legacy Companies Can Lead the Platform Revolution Without Burning Everything Down, offers a comprehensive framework for rethinking innovation in established firms. It is based on years of empirical research, real-world cases, and field-tested tools. But more than that, it introduces a unique integration of theory and GenAI: a platform design methodology supported by a generative AI “co-thinker” created specifically to support corporate decision-makers.
In this conversation, we dig deeper into the logic behind the book—and explore what it really means to lead business transformation through Platform Thinking.
Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is Platform Thinking?
Daniel Trabucchi: Platform Thinking is a strategic mindset that shifts the focus of innovation from internal optimization to external orchestration. Instead of designing products and pushing them to market, companies that adopt Platform Thinking focus on enabling interactions between different actors—customers, partners, suppliers, developers—by creating structures where value is co-created across the ecosystem.
Tommaso Buganza: In traditional business models, value flows linearly: the company builds a product, sells it to a customer, and captures value through the transaction. In platform-based models, value is generated by enabling others to interact—like riders and drivers on Uber, hosts and guests on Airbnb, users and creators on YouTube. The platform doesn’t produce the content or deliver the service directly; it facilitates the exchange, and the value emerges from the interaction.
What’s important to understand is that Platform Thinking is not just about technology. It’s a way of looking at the business as a connector and orchestrator of value. It’s about shifting questions from “what should we build?” to “what interactions should we enable?” and “how can we unlock new network effects?”
And while the examples we typically associate with this model are startups or tech giants, the mindset itself is fully applicable to legacy firms—if they’re willing to think differently about what they already have.
Why focus on Platform Thinking for legacy and established companies, rather than for startups, like most people do?
TB: Because we believe legacy companies are sitting on a massive, underutilized advantage. While most literature on platform strategy revolves around digital-native firms, our research shows that established companies actually have what it takes to become successful platforms—they just haven’t activated their potential.
Startups may be fast, agile, and free of legacy systems, but legacy companies have something far more difficult to replicate: relationships, trust, and infrastructure. They have loyal customers, established supplier networks, proprietary data, decades of industry know-how, and a powerful brand. All of these are what we call “idle assets”: resources that are being used, but not fully exploited.
Platform Thinking is about reactivating these idle assets and turning them into sources of platform value.
DT: For example, a legacy manufacturer can become the orchestrator of a developer ecosystem around its machines. An insurance company can use its customer relationships and data to build a risk management platform with third-party services. A global energy firm can transform its supply chain into a sustainability ecosystem. These are not theoretical scenarios—we’ve seen all of them happen.
So, the real question isn’t whether legacy firms can play the platform game. The question is whether they’re ready to reframe what makes them powerful. That’s where the concept of the “Digital Phoenix” comes in: it’s about rising not by abandoning the past, but by using it as fuel for the future.
What is the foundation of your book?
DT: The book is grounded in a rigorous empirical study that we conducted between 2023 and 2025 as part of our work at the Platform Thinking HUB. We started with a comprehensive review of the S&P 500 companies, excluding those that were born as platforms—such as Google, Meta, or Amazon—to focus on established firms that operate through more traditional, linear models.
Out of 484 companies, we identified and analyzed nearly 800 innovation initiatives. The majority of them were digital transformations aimed at improving efficiency, enhancing customer experience, or digitizing internal processes. But only 140 of these initiatives met our criteria to be considered true platform initiatives. These were cases where companies built multi-sided models with distinct user groups, facilitated transactions or co-creation, and triggered some form of network effect.
This dataset became the analytical backbone of the book. We didn’t stop at identifying platform cases—we categorized them among various dimensions.
TB: This led us to uncover five recurring business challenges that platforms help address, and five corresponding Platform Thinking Hacks—each representing a different strategy to activate legacy assets and drive transformation through ecosystem logic.
We combined these insights with three flagship case studies—Siemens Xcelerator, AXA’s Digital Commercial Platform, and Open-es by Eni—and structured the book into a practical framework for managers: from diagnosis to action, from strategic thinking to implementation.
And to support this transformation journey, we went one step further by introducing a GenAI-powered co-thinker: a GPT model designed to guide managers through the key steps of platform design, directly connected to the logic of our framework.
What are the key takeaways for managers?
TB: One of the main goals of the book is to translate platform theory into actionable insights for managers. What we discovered through our analysis is that legacy companies are not only able to launch platform initiatives—they’re already doing it. But the motivations, challenges, and patterns behind these initiatives are often misunderstood or under-leveraged.
DT: By studying the 140 platform cases in depth, we identified five recurring business problems that platform thinking can solve. These are not abstract or technical—they are problems every established company faces in different forms:
1. Missing or inefficient transactions
Firms often suffer from incomplete or poorly coordinated interactions, whether among external actors (like clients and partners) or within internal processes. Platform mechanisms can reduce friction and create more seamless value exchange.
2. Evolving customer demands
Customers today expect more than static products—they seek integrated, personalized, and dynamic solutions. Platform logic enables companies to bring in new stakeholders to address changing needs more flexibly.
3. Innovation bottlenecks
Traditional R&D processes can be too slow, too siloed, or too linear. Platform Thinking enables companies to complement internal capabilities with external ones, unlocking faster and more diverse innovation flows.
4. Underutilized data
Many companies have a vast amount of valuable data but lack a clear path to extract value from it. Platforms can serve as vehicles to repurpose and monetize existing data through shared services or new ecosystem plays.
5. Lack of strategic insights
In some cases, companies don’t have the data they need to make strategic decisions—especially when entering new domains. Platforms can act as “data harvesting” engines, generating useful insights through the activity of users, partners, or devices.
Each of these problems becomes an opportunity when reframed through the right platform logic. In the book, we call these responses “Platform Thinking Hacks”—shortcuts or strategies to transform a problem into an ecosystem-based solution. They are not generic templates; they are patterns grounded in real-world cases, designed to be adaptable to different business contexts.
And how can managers put all of this into practice?
TB: The practical engine of the book is what we call the Platform Thinking Journey: a four-phase methodology that supports managers from the moment they identify a challenge to the full design of a platform solution. The Journey is not a linear checklist but a structured process that helps teams iterate and reflect at every step. The four phases are:
– Framing: Understand the business problem and evaluate whether a platform strategy is appropriate.
– Design: Map out the ecosystem, define the actors, design the value exchange, and structure the incentives.
– Ignition: Strategize the launch, solve the “chicken-and-egg” paradox, and activate the first users.
– Growth: Scale the platform, manage network effects, and govern the evolving ecosystem.
To support the journey in a concrete way, we developed a set of tools—starting with a set of 30+ platform design cards, each aligned to one phase of the Journey. These cards are used in workshops, training programs, and innovation labs, helping managers ask the right questions at the right moment.
DT: But perhaps the most innovative tool we’ve developed is the Platform Thinking Journey GPT—a GenAI-powered co-thinker that assists managers throughout the journey. Built using OpenAI technology and trained on our research frameworks, the GPT acts as a virtual sparring partner. It challenges assumptions, suggests strategic alternatives, and helps navigate complex trade-offs in real time.
This is not a passive assistant. The GPT is fully integrated with our Journey logic and has been co-developed and field-tested with dozens of managers who participated in our Observatory activities. They’ve helped shape its prompts, workflows, and decision logic. As a result, the GPT is not only useful—it’s usable. It’s a step toward what we call “strategy augmentation”: using GenAI not to automate decisions, but to expand strategic thinking and support better judgment.
You mention co-developing your tools with managers. That’s not so common in academia. Why is it so important to your approach?
DT: Because we believe innovation research should not live only in academic journals—it should make an impact in real companies. And to do that, we follow the principles of design science research: a research approach that focuses not only on explaining phenomena, but on designing and testing practical solutions to real-world problems.
In other words, we don’t just study platforms—we help build them. And we don’t do that alone.
TB: The Platform Thinking HUB, which we founded at Politecnico di Milano, is more than a research lab. It’s a community of innovation leaders from legacy firms who work with us continuously through workshops, surveys, roundtables, and experimentation. This co-creation model is what allowed us to turn a theoretical framework into a practical methodology, and a GPT model into a usable strategic companion.
Every tool in the book—cards, hacks, journey maps, and GenAI prompts—was shaped in direct collaboration with practitioners. And that’s probably why the feedback we hear most often is: “This is finally something we can use.”
To bring this approach to a broader, international audience, we’re now launching a brand-new online executive certification: Leading Business Transformation through Platform Thinking, developed within POLIMI Graduate School of Management, our business school.
It will start at the end of September and will be fully accessible online, aimed at managers and innovation leaders worldwide who want to master platform strategy in a structured, evidence-based way. With it, we hope to scale the Digital Phoenix Effect—helping more legacy firms rediscover their power and turn transformation into a platform for lasting impact.
Daniel Trabucchi is an Associate Professor at the School of Management, Politecnico di Milano. He has been featured in the Thinkers50 Radar list in 2024. He co-founded Symplatform in 2018, the international conference on digital platforms that aims to match scholars and practitioners in the field. He co-founded and is scientific director of Platform Thinking HUB, part of the Digital Innovation Observatories of Politecnico di Milano.
Tommaso Buganza is a Full Professor at the School of Management, Politecnico di Milano. He has been featured in the Thinkers50 Radar list in 2024. He co-founded Symplatform in 2018, the international conference on digital platforms that aims to match scholars and practitioners in the field. He co-founded and is scientific director of Platform Thinking HUB, part of the Digital Innovation Observatories of Politecnico di Milano.
Last Updated on July 9, 2025 by Krzysztof Kotlarski