Legacy Firms being Agile: Launching Incumbent-Born Platforms

Digital platforms are disrupting traditional markets, and legacy firms are responding by building platforms themselves. However, they frequently struggle with this transition due to internal gaps, mistaken assumptions, and organizational misalignment. Existing literature primarily explores platforms through strategic and business model lenses, leaving a significant blind spot regarding the internal organizational transformation required, specifically how firms bridge the misfit between their traditional capabilities and the architectural and governance requirements of platform orchestration. This study addresses this gap by investigating how agility supports this transition. Adopting an exploratory qualitative design, the research draws on a multiple-case study approach involving four major legacy firms building incumbent-born digital platforms across diverse industries. Preliminary findings from an ongoing data collection (11 interviews conducted; target: 40–50) identify four elements through which agility operates as a bridge mechanism: Leadership Alignment, Autonomous Teams, Incremental Deployment, and Modular Thinking. These are synthesized into the nascent Platform-Led Agility Framework, which maps which agility element emerge to solve to a specific platform-theoretical problem – value impedance, organizational boundary dynamics, mistaken assumptions, and core-periphery architecture respectively. This extends platform literature into an agile management perspective, and contributes to agility literature by specifying which elements of organizational agility act as key mechanisms for platform-based innovation in incumbent firms.