What is Business 2.0?

In my previous post, what is business ?( https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/what-business-satish-chavan) we briefly discussed about what is business and what business engine means and what it takes to scale business. 

Sangeet Paul Chaudhary classifies businesses in primarily three categories 

1.    Stuff Business: With stuff businesses approach to solving problem is creating more. 

Example 1: if there is increase in demand for transportation needs, increase number of cars to be manufactured. 

Example 2: There is increase in number of business travelers, so increase number of business hotel rooms. 

With stuff approach, approach to scaling business is creating more. If you are dealing with goods you are churning out more goods. If you are services company. You are putting more people on the job.

2.    Optimization Business: Here the focus is, how can we better distribute the stuff already created. Optimization businesses aggregate information on stuff and leverage algorithm to match sides.  

Example 1: Google built one of the fastest growing companies of all times by applying optimization approach to worlds information. 

3.    Platform Business: Platform business focus is, how can we redefine 'stuff' and find new ways of solving the same problem. With platform businesses, instead of merely aggregating information on stuff, it enables creation of more inventory without creating more stuff. i.e. stuff approach creates supply, platform approach uncovers new sources of supply. 

Apart from this, John Hagel in his article Power of platforms provides one more interesting perspective for platform businesses https://dupress.com/articles/platform-strategy-new-level-business-trends/ . 

He classifies platform businesses into following 3 categories 

1.    Aggregation Platforms 

2.    Social Platforms 

3. Mobilization platforms