We continue to develop our “sketchpad” on platform thinking for the energy industry. Developed with the assistance of AI tools, including Google’s NotebookLM, OpenAI’s ChatGPT. With a video this time. Not bad! The synthesis and conclusions are my own, perhaps? As ever, if you spot mistakes or have feedback, please let me know, and do get in touch directly if you’d like to develop the conversation.
In the first post of this series we looked at the shift from pipelines to platforms. In the second, we sharpened the distinction between aggregators and platforms, borrowing Ben Thompson’s lens to cut through the marketing fog around what a “platform” really is…
Now it’s time to add a new perspective: the Smiling Curve.
Where Value Pools
The Smiling Curve was first articulated by Stan Shih, founder of Acer, in the 1990s. His insight was simple: in many industries, value tends to flow to the ends of the value chain, while the middle gets squeezed.
On the left, upstream specialist technology captures value because of high barriers to entry and accumulated expertise.
On the right, customer-facing ecosystems capture value by orchestrating interactions, building brands, and owning demand.
In the middle, capital-intensive but standardised offerings suffer from low differentiation.
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