Title of Presentation: Platform-based service operations in the era of industry 4.0

Abstract:

The Fourth Industrial Revolution or the Industry 4.0 (Ind4.0) dismantles the existing production methods and breaks the boundaries between industries, thereby creating new demands and reshaping the markets. The new production systems in the era of Ind4.0 can be identified as manufacturing-service synthesis or ‘servicification’ due to the underlying mega trend of integration between products and services. The platform is actually at the heart of this change. However, the existing analytical frameworks developed based on the linear value chain model may not properly capture the value production mechanisms in the new era. Therefore, the academia has been trying to develop new perspectives together with novel analytical tools. One of the representative academic achievements is the notion of the business ecosystem organized by a multi-sided platform. While the economic characteristics of the multi-sided platforms and their ecosystems have been widely studied, however, the operations and their value creation mechanisms in the platform ecosystems have not been actively studied. In this background, I first introduce a couple of studies addressing important operational issues in the multi-sided platform ecosystems. They include the newsvendor model extended in the context of the two-sided markets (Chou et al, 2012), platform operations in the sharing economy (Kostami et al., 2017), and the nonlinear value creation mechanisms in the value ecosystems (Kim, 2017; 2018). Except for these studies, the lack of research on the nonlinear production systems in the platform-based servicification could be found in that we have not yet fully figured out the key issues on the current changes of the production mechanisms. Accordingly, I suggest some important issues and research points on the production system evolution led by platform-based servicification in the era of Ind4.0. These are the subjects such as complementarity and flexibility in resource reconfiguration, of which prior studies already exist in the field of management sciences in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Milgrom & Roberts, 1990; Roth, 1982). In sum, management science plays an important role in developing a more systematic approach and research framework for the nonlinear production mechanisms in the value ecosystems as well as the integrated manufacturing-service operations of the platform businesses in the era of Ind4.0.

Bio

Dr. Kim is a Professor of the School of Management at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. He received B.S. with honor in International Economics (with minor in Statistics and Informatics) from Seoul National Univ., and Ph.D. in Management Engineering from KAIST (Korea Advance Institute of Science and Technology). Dr. Kim serves as the editor-in-chief of Korean Management Science.