Annabelle Gawer “Digital Power: Platforms & Ecosystems as the Dominant Organizational Form

Annabelle Gawer: “Digital Power: Platforms and Ecosystems as the Dominant Organizational Form and New Social Institutions of the Digital Age”

Professor Annabelle Gawer will discuss digital power. In particular, she will discuss the main implications of the rise of digital platforms and ecosystems on competition, innovation, and power. Digital platform firms and their ecosystems are the emblematic organizational form of the digital age, because they tap into the new ways in which value can be created and captured thanks to pervasive connectivity, the availability of processing power, and globalized digital innovation.

The paradox of digital platforms is that while distributed patterns of value creation characterize the circumstances that allowed them to emerge, the business models they have adopted have led to a centralised modality of value capture. This has given rise to salient instances of digital platform firms’ abuse of economic power. Platforms have become the private governors of vast ecosystems that span over multiple sectors. But their influence of platform is not limited to economic power. They also exert influence on other spheres of social life, as for example the power to influence opinions. In that way, digital platforms and their ecosystems have also become new institutions of the digital age.

Speaker: Annabelle Gawer, University of Surrey, UK
Moderator: Hannes Werthner, TU Wien, Austria

The Digital Humanism Lecture Series is organized by the Faculty of Informatics of TU Wien and TU Wien's Center for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (CAIML).

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Digital Europe Programme under Grant Agreement No. 101123121 (EURIDICE) https://euridice.eu/ and from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101212890 (EUDHIT) and https://eudhit.eu/.