Platforms and Research Solutions will be key for STM

This article from MIT Sloan Management was worth of breaking a long silence on this blog.

Today there are plenty of similarities in the STM market from young start-up companies.

When we started Elsevier Applications and Developer Network initiative, we envisioned that

"The newest era of the Information Age could very well be called the Age of Platforms, given the explosion of markets defined by platform competition. Increasing numbers of companies big and small, whether providing hardware devices, traditional software or software in the cloud [for researchers], are attempting to become platform masters by releasing application programming interfaces that allow others to build software and hardware products or complementary services on top of their technology offerings. Platform competition is expanding into many markets and can be found today in a variety of industries [including STM] and on different scales: from the nearly universal platforms of the Internet, credit cards and the telephone to newer Internet-enabled platforms such as Facebook, Skype, Google Maps and PayPal.

 If you are in STM and have not started to open up your platform and invited developers to build solutions to improve researchers efficiency, you are in trouble.