01
Where are we?
Identify the platforms and layers that are relevant to the strategic question.
Platform Generation Research Series · No. 01 / 2026
Locate Yourself
Platform Awareness. Know where you are before deciding where to go.
Research Essay · September 2026
Before platform strategy comes orientation.
Platform strategy often begins after a focal platform has already been selected and an organization's role within it has largely been assumed. Locate Yourself asks an earlier question: which platforms already matter to the organization, and who is the organization within each of them?
Know where you are before deciding where to go.
Davis Adedayo EisapeVersion 1.0 · 2026
The question before strategy
What if the first strategic problem is simply locating yourself?
Organizations rarely participate in only one relevant system. A company can own one platform, consume infrastructure from another, provide capabilities into a third, and depend on standards, interfaces or institutions that become strategically visible only when they change.
Platform Awareness is proposed as an organization's explicit and revisable understanding of the platforms in which it operates, the layer, position and role it occupies within each, and the strategic possibilities, dependencies and implications arising from those positions and their interconnection.
The essay develops the idea through a prehistoric boundary case and five historically grounded organizational cases, then introduces the Platform Landscape as a way to make several positions visible at once using connected PBMC Core Frames.
Platform Awareness
Three orientation questions.
The framework does not begin by asking whether an organization should become a Platform Owner. It begins by making position visible.
02
Who are we here?
Understand the organization's position and counterpart roles within each platform.
03
What is possible?
Recognize the opportunities, dependencies and implications created by those positions.
Five historical movements
Different technologies. The same need to re-locate the organization.
The cases are illustrative rather than representative. Their purpose is not to prove that Platform Awareness causes success, but to make recurring positional movements visible across very different periods and technologies.
01
Edward Lloyd
A coffee-house owner becomes a strategically important participant in a wider maritime information and exchange system he does not own.
02
Western Union
An existing communications network supports a different transaction when trusted information enables remote access to funds.
03
Richard Warren Sears
Mail order scales by fitting the business to postal and railway infrastructures whose governance remains outside the firm.
04
Amazon Web Services
Reusable capabilities that first appear as internal technical prerequisites are reinterpreted as infrastructure for external developers.
05
Shopify
A successful Platform Owner can itself become Provider or Partner when a new interface layer forms around commerce.
Platform Landscape
One organization can play different roles in different platforms.
A company may run one platform, use another, and provide important capabilities to a third. Its strategic position therefore depends on which platform we are looking at.
Platform Awareness starts by making these different positions visible at the same time.
In this essay, this connected view is called a Platform Landscape. The PBMC can then be used to examine each platform in more detail.
Create a PBMC ↗One organization · three platform contexts
Your organization
The role changes with the platform
Platform A01
You run it
Your roleOwner
Platform B02
You use it
Your roleConsumer
Platform C03
You enable it
Your roleProvider
Same organization. Different role, depending on the platform.
Read & cite
Locate Yourself: Platform Awareness
Platform Generation Research Series, No. 01 / 2026. Berlin: Platform Generation.
Suggested citation
Eisape, D. A. (2026) Locate Yourself: Platform Awareness. Platform Generation Research Series, No. 01 / 2026. Berlin: Platform Generation.