Platform Thinking in Action: A design science research to bring the platform revolution in legacy firms

Digital platforms have become a dominant logic for value creation and innovation, yet legacy firms still struggle to translate platform principles into actionable organizational transformation. A central reason is cognitive: managers often mis-frame platforms as digital services rather than as ecosystem-based value architectures. This paper adopts a Design Science approach to develop and refine the Platform Thinking Journey, a composite managerial artifact that supports platform transformation in incumbent firms. Developed through a three-year, multi-firm collaboration within the Platform Thinking HUB, the artifact evolved across three iterative waves from exploratory tools into a validated journey structured around four phases: Framing, Design, Ignition, and Growth. The resulting Platform Thinking Journey combines a process model, bounded decision cycles, and an integrated physical and digital, or “phygital”, support architecture, including cards, canvases, workshops, digital templates, and a GenAI co-thinker. Its core mechanism is to make platform theory actionable by presenting structured alternatives grounded in the literature, focusing managerial attention, reducing ambiguity, and aligning interpretation before teams consolidate choices through design tools and milestones. The study contributes to platform and innovation management research by showing how platform transformation can be actively supported through design, and by identifying five design principles for incumbent firms: reframing from products to interactions before solutioning, structuring the process as bounded decision cycles, materializing reasoning through boundary objects, balancing conceptual depth with cognitive manageability, and sustaining reflection through phygital continuity. Methodologically, the paper offers a rigorous application of Design Science to a non-technical managerial artifact in a multi-wave, multi-firm collaborative setting. For managers, the Platform Thinking Journey provides a structured way to reframe platform opportunities, make key design choices explicit, and sustain reflection across the transformation process.