Innovation Economy of Platforms

The new world is being developed with new platforms. In the last few centuries, new world was explored in Americas, Austalia and many other parts of the planet. The first requirement for development of these new world was to build the transport infrastructure. Once the shipping routes and railway and road highway infrastructure was created, it automatically followed with millions of entrepreneurs who started trading, manufacturing, service businesses.

Same thing is now happening in the new world connected with internet and powered by exponential technologies. In the last few decades, Information Highways are developed all across the world and that has fuelled growth of Internet or Web entrepreneurs. Those countries which were ahead of the rest in building high band width internet infrastructure have notices maximum development of Internet economy. This followed with robust mobile phone infrastructure, fuelling mobile revolution. This strategy of building the infrastructure platform which will be utilized by millions of entrepreneurs to build their businesses, is being adopted by several Fortune 500 top technology companies, like IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and even our Indian IT services multinationals like TCS, Infosys etc.

Apple and Google built the platforms for their iOS and Adroid users.

Within just 5 years, 1.25 million entrepreneurs have developed apps for Apple iOS platform and 85 billion users have downloaded these apps. A entirely new economy of Apps market was created.

Take for an example, how IBM is developing a platform with Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. So many entrepreneurs are exploring the opportunities of building products and services which will use AI. Now they need not worry about building underlying AI infrastructure. A doctor who would like to build a specialized diagnostics service in his niche area of specialization can build his service on IBM Watson platform which readily provides access to whole worlds knowledge of medicine and AI capabilities for diagnostics. Once this doctor has developed his services in his specialized area of expertise on IBM Watson platform, the Doctor's business and IBM's Watson platform will grow together. IBM is therefore providing all facilities for new entrepreneurs to build their businesses on their platform.

Same holds true with SAP, which is promoting the SAP Hana platform, Amazon which is promoting AWS platform and Google's Appengine and Microsoft's Azure etc. etc. Our Engineering colleges should take advantage of this opportunity and try to get as many platforms on the campus for students to build their start ups. Generally all these platform companies will offer free acess to students and also several other mentoring and training opportunities.