Enhancing collaboration and knowledge sharing through intra-organizational platforms: a design science research study

Platforms have revolutionized value creation by enabling efficient matchmaking between customer groups. While traditionally associated with external value exchange, platform thinking represents the mechanism that, through matchmaking, supports established firms to innovate by orchestrating available resources. While platforms are known in the literature for creating value by efficiently connecting external customer groups, their potential to support efficient collaboration among internal units in established organizations remains underexplored. How to adopt platform thinking to promote intra-organizational collaboration is also a problem faced by the manager of Confcooperative Lombardia, a business association supporting cooperatives in value creation, seeking to improve internal collaboration. By adopting a Design Science Research, which included physical and digital workshops involving the entire organization, this study developed an artifact that illustrates how platforms can serve as a framework for redesigning collaboration and knowledge sharing between internal units. Matchmaking becomes a ritual that employees can flexibly adopt to ask for support and share best practices. This research reframes platforms as tools for guiding collaboration within organizations, extending beyond their digital functionality. Since the platform operates as an intraorganizational process rather than a digital system, its functioning depends on empowering individuals, who collectively act as the algorithm that drives matchmaking and knowledge exchange. Employees are guided by agile and platform thinking as cultural frameworks that sustain collaboration, presenting platforms as processes that can be scaled across the organization. By leveraging this process, organizations can better utilize resources distributed across various units. Managers, in turn, can adopt platform thinking into organizational culture to create a scalable process that guides internal collaboration and knowledge sharing.