March 2021 agricultural “platforms” in a digital era

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Figure 3: Pipeline and Platform business models
Sources: Presutti, D. (August 2, 2017). “Carriers looking to deliver living services must drop outdated business practices.” Deloitte. 
insuranceblog.
accenture.com/carriers-looking-to-deliver-living-services-must-drop-outdated-business-practices
; Parker, G., Alstyne, M. V., & Choudary, S. P. (2017). 
Platform revolution: How networked markets are transforming the economy and how to make them work for you. New York: W.W. Norton & 
Company.; ISF Advisors and RAF Learning Lab analysis
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As a starting point for this research, we classify 
those that commonly refer to themselves as 
Platforms into three distinct categories. 
Digital Platforms tend to be private sector-led, 
with a focus on facilitating exchanges
between users. Improving the volume, value,
or likelihood of an exchange or interaction, or
reducing the transaction cost of such, is how 
Digital Platforms create value. Importantly, 
the interactions facilitated by Digital Platforms 
involve multiple users on each side of an interaction. 
The Digital Platform operator itself is not considered 
a direct participant in the interactions but rather 
a facilitator. Digital solutions, on the other 
hand, tend to be software-based services provided 
directly to customers, which can be businesses or 
farmers/consumers. The software can be used to 
facilitate and optimize interactions but typically 
without multiple users on each side; instead, the 
solution is provided by a single actor and either 
applied to that actor’s own operations or targeted 
at that single actor’s customers.
Finally, coordination initiatives bring together 
a range of actors around a common issue or 
strategy, and are typically not digitally enabled. 
Coordination initiatives are often referred to as 
Multi-stakeholder Platforms (MSPs), and may be 
run by/include any actor, including public, private, 
civil society, and multilateral organizations. Their 
value is around creating shared learning agendas, 
action frameworks, and other means of enhancing 
learning and coordination, and typically focus on 
a specific issue or value chain.