The world's most valuable public companies and its first trillion-dollar businesses are built on digital platforms that bring together two or more market actors and grow through network effects. The top-ranked companies by market capitalization are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google's parent company), and Amazon. Facebook, Alibaba, and Tencent are not far behind. As of January 2020, these seven companies represented more than $6.3 trillion in market value, and all of them are platform businesses.

1. Why is Apple App Store a transaction platform and IBM Watson an innovation platformsee the figure in the Case?Based on your reading of Supply chain drivers and metrics, how would platformization affect:

(a) any two inventory metrics;

(b) any two transportation metrics;

(c) any two sourcing metrics (6 points, 3 slides)?

2. Based on your reading of Coordination in Supply Chains, what are two most-likely obstacles of coordination that are mitigated by platformization ?

3. Would a platform for sourcing be considered a transaction or an innovation platform (? You can use the example platform given below to answer your question.

https://www.corcentric.com/blog/the-benefits-of-platform-based-sourcing/