Daniel Trabucchi & Tommaso Buganza

Why organisations work with Trabucchi and Buganza

• The Platform Thinking Matrix gives strategy and transformation teams a structured instrument for identifying precisely where platform mechanisms can be applied to existing business models, built from a decade of research on established companies, not borrowed from startup literature.
• The Digital Phoenix Effect draws on analysis of 140 platform initiatives across S&P 500 companies, with detailed cases from Siemens, AXA, Eni, and Domino’s – the organisations their research is built around look like most audiences, not like Silicon Valley startups.
• With 100+ peer-reviewed publications in journals including the Journal of Product Innovation Management and Technovation, their frameworks can be tested against sustained evidence – not just a practitioner’s conviction codified into a model.
• As Scientific Directors of the Platform Thinking HUB within Politecnico’s Digital Innovation Observatories, they give organisations access to live, connected research, not a fixed set of frameworks.
• Shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award in Digital Thinking: the body that the Financial Times has described as producing the Oscars of management thinking.

Biography highlights

• Associate Professor of Platform Thinking (Trabucchi) and Full Professor of Leadership & Innovation (Buganza), School of Management, Politecnico di Milano
• Co-founders and Scientific Directors of the Platform Thinking HUB within Politecnico’s Digital Innovation Observatories, and of LEADIN’Lab; Buganza chairs the EIASM International Product Development Management Conference
• Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2024; shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award, Digital Thinking category
• Co-authors of Platform Thinking: Read the Past. Write the Future (Business Expert Press, 2023) – shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2024 and translated into Italian and Chinese – and The Digital Phoenix Effect (Platform Thinking Publishing, 2025)
• 100+ peer-reviewed articles in journals including the Journal of Product Innovation Management, Technovation, and Information Systems Journal
• Co-founders of Symplatform (2018), the annual international conference on digital platforms connecting researchers and practitioners

Biography

Most digital transformation advice is written for companies that do not yet exist. Trabucchi and Buganza study the ones that do: established firms with legacy assets, existing customer relationships, and infrastructure they cannot simply abandon.

Over more than a decade at Politecnico di Milano’s School of Management, they developed Platform Thinking as a named strategic framework. It is not a description of what Uber or Airbnb do. It is a method for how any established organisation can activate its existing assets to generate the multi-sided value that platform businesses create. The Platform Thinking Matrix formalises this as a practical instrument for strategy and transformation teams.

Their 2025 book, The Digital Phoenix Effect, draws on 140 platform initiatives analysed across S&P 500 companies, with cases from Siemens, AXA, Eni, and Domino’s. The argument that incumbent firms cannot compete in the platform economy on their own terms is a common one. Trabucchi and Buganza make the opposite case, and back it with sustained empirical research. Both were included in the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2024 and shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award in Digital Thinking.

As co-founders of Symplatform and Scientific Directors of the Platform Thinking HUB, they connect rigorous academic research to active practitioner communities. Their frameworks emerge from sustained, peer-reviewed inquiry – over 100 published articles across journals including the Journal of Product Innovation Management and Technovation – not from advisory work alone.

Key speaking topics

• Platform thinking and business model transformation
• Legacy organisations in the platform economy
• The Platform Thinking Matrix
• Data as a platform asset
• GenAI and internal platform development
• Platform leadership and innovation management
• Multi-sided platforms and ecosystem strategy

Ideal for

• Chief Strategy Officers and Chief Digital Officers leading platform transformation in established businesses
• CEOs and boards of legacy organisations facing disruption from platform competitors
• Innovation and transformation leads in non-digital-native companies
• Executive MBA and corporate learning audiences focused on digital business model innovation

Audience outcomes

• A working definition of Platform Thinking and how it differs from conventional digital transformation advice
• The Platform Thinking Matrix as a practical framework for identifying where platform mechanisms apply to existing business models
• Real cases from established firms – Siemens, AXA, Eni, Domino’s – showing how legacy assets become platform advantages
• Clarity on the specific leadership conditions that enable platform-based change within established organisations
• A starting point for assessing their organisation’s platform potential against a research-backed framework