Platform strategies have become crucial to innovation. In particular, Digital platforms are becoming more and more central to value creation and value delivery. Platforms help companies and organization leverage the power of ecosystems to grow and reach outstanding results that cannot be reached independently. Even smaller and niche economic sectors could be ​organized in platform-powered markets,​​ and made grow by factors like internationalization, network effects generation, improvement of the quality of services provided and consumed.

In this context, NIMBLE aims to provide a mean for guiding potential new platform owners in deploying their own digital platform in a specific manufacturing market / sector, by using the NIMBLE platform as baseline. As part of supporting a company to launch a new instantiation of the NIMBLE solution and create its own B2B platform, the NIMBLE project decided to adopt an existing open source toolkit: The Platform Design Toolkit (https://platformdesigntoolkit.com).

The toolkit is a methodology and a set of design canvases specifically devised to help designers, founders and managers to design strategies, products and organizations “as a platform”. In order to assess the effectiveness of such a toolkit, we run a workshop in Bologna (Italy) the 27th February 2019, involving all NIMBLE use case partners that went through all main steps of the methodology and started to shape their digital platform strategy based on NIMBLE platform.

Based on the obtained positive results and feedback from partners, we plan to include this type of workshop and activities in our NIMBLE offering and support any potential new platform owner to shape its own platform strategy.