Key competencies for successful market entry in Iran's digital platform markets

Introduction: Platform business models have recently become popular, and the success of different platforms in the world and in Iran has increased this popularity even more. Platforms have disrupted businesses globally. Online technologies empower start-ups, which will grow in size, business volume, and stock value within a few years and strike down large companies. A platform business model is a disruptive force and is capable of sweeping aside traditional businesses which are using a legacy pipeline business model.
 The study of platform business models became a topic of even greater interest due to the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This global health crisis forced companies to accelerate the digital transformation process and people to live exclusively in the digital world. The platform business model is also becoming a key point of interest to many publications that presents successful platform strategies from the business reality.
These issues alongside some platforms' failure in different industries show the need for field research in our country to deepen the knowledge about this concept. One of the obvious necessities of active businesses in Iran is to understand key competencies to succeed in the country's local market because of fundamental differences of Iranian platform markets from those in other countries and the developing of these competencies in their businesses. So, this research aims at two successful transactional digital platforms in Iran which were active in the online transportation market. Also, key competencies are identified and prioritized in order for a successful entry into multisided platform markets.
Methodology: The methodology adopted in this research work is exploratory, and a multiple case study is done as the main approach. This has also been done by a great number of authors studying the business platforms because it makes possible for the researchers to investigate the data both within each particular situation and across situations.
This research has been done in two stages. In the first stage, using the multiple case study strategy and through semi-structured interviews with executive and operational managers as well as related archival reports selected through theoretical sampling, two case studies (Tapsi and Snapp) are conducted with 17 interviews and 7 archival reports. Also, theme analysis serves to analyze the data. The interview questionnaire was presented to three experts, and their advice was applied for reliability. Retests and intra-subject methods showed the acceptable reliability of the questionnaire.
In the second stage, we used the linear BWM multi-criteria decision-making method to prioritize the key competencies and gathered the data from 12 experts through a questionnaire. The experts were chosen by the snowball sampling method.
Results and discussion: In the first stage of the research through theme analysis, eight themes were identified as key competencies for a successful entry to multi-sided platform markets. These themes include accurate pricing, human resources competencies, investors' competency in protecting the platform against regulatory ambiguities, technical support and technical issue-resolving speed, availability, proficiency in swift expansion, right timing, and user-friendliness.
In the second stage, using linear BWM, these themes were prioritized and, as a result, we identified human resources as the most important competency and user-friendliness as the least important one.
Conclusion: With a thorough review of the result, it can be found out that, except human resources and technical support competencies that have a higher priority and user-friendliness which has a low priority, the other competencies have almost the same priority. The low priority of user-friendliness may be because of the two main functions of platforms that overshadow it, namely operation and technology; user-friendliness has a lower weight because users are mostly attracted to platforms that have higher technology and suit their needs better. The operational efficiency of the platform in reaching higher standards of service provided by suppliers for buyers and the availability of a richer pool of customers for suppliers have more crucial role in choosing the platform by users.
As this research shows, in order to have a successful entry into platform markets, businesses should consider forming competent teams, offering acceptable technical support, expanding swiftly, increasing the speed of availability to their services along with accurate pricing with a user-friendly application, and entering at the right time.
According to the results of this study, we suggest further studies being conducted on every competency identified to gain a better understanding of them. It is also suggested to study failing platforms like Carpino to test the reliability and importance of the competencies identified in this research.