Research Trend and Futuristic Guideline of Platform-Based Business in Korea

Platform is considered as an alternative strategy to the traditional linear pipeline based business. Moreover, in the 4th industrial revolution period, efficiency driven pipeline business model needs to be changed to platform business. We have such success stories about platform as Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber, and so on. However, for those smaller corporations, it is not easy to find out the transformation strategy. The essence of platform business is to leverage network effect in management. Thus platform based management can be rephrased as network management across the business functions. Research on platform business is popular and related to diverse facets. But few scholars cover what the research trend of the domain is. The main purpose of this paper is to identify the research trend on platform business in Korea. To do that we first propose the analytical model for platform architecture whose components are consumers, suppliers, artifacts, and IT platform system. We conjecture that mapping of the research work on platform to the components of the model will make us understand the hidden domain of platform research. We propose three hypotheses regarding the characteristics of research and one proposition for the transitional path from pipeline to platform business model. The mapping is based on the research articles filtered from the Korea Citation Index, using keyword search. Research papers are searched through the keywords provided by authors using the word of “platform”. The filtered articles are summarized in terms of the attributes such as major component of platform considered, platform type, main purpose of the research, and research method. Using the filtered data, we test the hypotheses in exploratory ways. The contribution of our research is as follows: First, based on the findings, scholars can find the areas of research on the domain: areas where research has been matured and territory where future research is actively sought. Second, the proposition provided can give business practitioners the guideline for changing their strategy from pipeline to platform oriented. This research needs to be considered as exploratory not inferential since subjective judgments are involved in data collection, classification, and interpretation of research articles.