Twenty-Ninth European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2021), 2021,
Juni 2021
Currently, platform-based business models are most successful regarding revenue growth and market shares. However, the stepwise evolution of organizations’ business models towards multi-sided platforms is not fully understood. Therefore, we conduct a longitudinal case study on the IT organization ServiceNow. Based on publicly available data, we build on research on business model evolution, platform emergence, and platform ecosystems to analyze the evolution of ServiceNow’s business model between 2004-2020. We derive four distinct mechanisms comprising continuous value proposition extension and enablement of value co-creation. These are enabled by opening towards partners and iteratively addressing new customer segments. We contribute to research on business model evolution with insights on the evolution towards platform business models. Besides, we complement the perspective of platform emergence by a nuanced business model view, bridging these two literature streams. Practitioners benefit from the mechanisms to guide their business model evolution towards a multi-sided platform business model.