Digital platforms: Wrestling with the sustainability design challenges

Abstract

During an executive meeting, the senior vice president of a large technology firm discussed recent sustainability developments with the managing director of a global implementation firm. They concluded that sustainability is gaining traction and significantly impacts data collection, analysis, and reporting. They agreed to jointly invest in developing a sustainability module to integrate into the technology firm’s digital platform. By reaching out to a client interested in becoming a “launching customer,” they established a digital platform ecosystem and created the sustainability module. This case outlines the real design challenges faced by the ecosystem partners. Seven (7) design challenges have been identified, ranging from selecting and importing data tracking metrics against goals and targets to creating a dashboard. Three environmentoriented features (e.g., decarbonization, travel emissions, energy consumption) were launched as a minimum viable product and rolled out to the client. This teaching case consists of two parts: the first part introduces the concept of sustainability, digital platform ecosystems, a case description, and the design framework, while the second part discusses the seven identified design challenges.