Progress in ICT technologies and the potentials of value creation through software-intensive business simultaneously generate new challenges for non-it companies. Platforms could be a solution to address these challenges and this is why a platform approach receives an increasing attention in many industries, changing the traditional collaboration structures. The complexity to choose the right platform from the variety of the market-available solutions on the other hand, is a complex decision for non-IT companies, which is influenced by the variety of the specific functional characteristics offered by each platform or each hosting system and other characteristics. Previous research has mostly taken the platform-provider perspective and focused on the attractive platform design for the complementors. However, the question of how decision makers in non-IT companies as BMW, Siemens, Telekom or Deutsche Post set up the choice of a platform and what they should consider in terms of product development and management for platform-based software products still remains unanswered and forms the main focus of this contribution.

In addition to his ISPMA membership, Prof. Dr. rer. pol. Georg Herzwurm has been a member of the Executive Board of the Business Administration Institute at the University of Stuttgart and heads the Chair of Information Systems II. Since 2018, he has been one of the founding members of the new research discipline on “Software-Intensive Business”, shaped at the Dagstuhl Seminar 18182. Since 2013, he has also been a member of the directors board and director of the "Management of Global Manufacturing Networks" cluster of the graduate school GSaME (graduate school of excellence advanced manufacturing engineering) in Stuttgart (Germany). He is also a founding member and spokesman of the QFD-Institut Deutschland and Director of the International Council for QFD (ICQFD). Because of his contributions to the development and promotion of QFD, he received the international Akao Prize in 2000. Furthermore he is a honorary advisor of Asia QFD Association. Prof. Dr. Herzwurm is the spokesman of the WI-MAW (management of application development and maintenance) committee of the Gesellschaft für Informatik eV. (GI) and belongs to the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Software Business. His activities at the chair include numerous teaching and research projects in the context of start-up management. In addition, Herzwurm worked as an adviser to the state government within the framework of the ICT summit in Baden-Württemberg in 2013 and supervises projects in the LivingLab BWe mobil of the BMBF top-cluster electromobility Süd-West. Prof. Dr. Herzwurm is also committed to supporting interested students who are interested in foundations within the initiative of the so-called EXIST start-up grants of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy.