Georg Reischauer co-organized the event “Societal Platforms: Between Markets and Grand Challenges" as part of the Virtual Series of the Knowledge and Innovation Interest Group of the Strategic Management Society.

The rise of platforms as organizational forms to address grand societal challenges has been exponential across industries, catalyzing manifold stakeholders. Examples such as Amnesty Decoder, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, and the Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation (CAPSSI) are initiatives where mission-driven platforms create societal impact with collective solutions against sustainability problems. These societal platforms address the UN sustainable development goals—for example, fighting poverty, education, climate actions, and sustainable cities and communities— on a large scale and at speed by orchestrating an ecosystem and creating value for the market and society. 

Practice generally highlights that the platforms' philanthropic nature and the pro-social mission determine a very peculiar design and governance for those organizations. Yet, research in the field is still scarce, with pioneering contributions focusing on the mission framing (Rauch and Ansari, JMS 2021), the crowds' role (Selander and Jarvenpaa, AMD 2020) and the institutional boundaries (Logue and Grimes, SMJ 2020).

This panel aims to discuss the societal platforms' strategic design and governance to tackle grand challenges. Click here, opens an external URL in a new window to learn more.