16.00 – 16.15  Welcome - Helle Zinner Henriksen, Head of Department.

16.15 – 16.45 Keynote Carsten Sørensen, DIREC Professor of Digital Innovation. 

16.45 - 17.00 Discussion  

17.00: Reception 

Abstract
Global digital platforms, such as those commanded by Apple, Google, Facebook, Tencent, and others, are not business model templates merely to be replicated. While the digital platform era of the past decade has signaled market domination by a few organisations, the most likely outcome is a diverse set of critical digital technologies embedded across all processes. Emerging important digital and cyber-physical technologies such as AI, The Internet of Things, autonomous systems, digital twins, virtual and augmented reality, and blockchain create a rich variety of strategic business challenges and practical use cases requiring a complex supporting ecosystem of firms. Within this context, the digital platform can be understood, reconfigured, and internalised in all organisations as an operating model. Whereas the current smartphone and internet platformisation results in a few rule makers and many rule-takers, the rich future ecosystems will face the challenge of multi-platformisation. The challenges of flexible multi-party business models can be resolved through what can be characterised as digital cooperatives. Deep insight into the business model relationships between services, platforms, and infrastructures is critical to enable practical strategising within such a scenario. Furthermore, such multi-platform ecosystems presuppose agreed-on value-sensitive digital infrastructures as the underlying foundation for distributed multi-party value exchanges.

Carsten Sørensen is CBS DIREC Professor of Digital Innovation. He holds a BSc in Mathematics, an MSc in computer science and a PhD. in Information Systems from Aalborg University, Denmark. Carsten has since 1989 been affiliated with a number of Danish, Swedish and British institutions and have recently returned to Denmark after 28 years in the UK and the last 24 years at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He has multi-decade experience in both the study of the digital transformation of enterprises and the further extension to understand how digital platforms and -infrastructures form the foundation of contemporary business operating and innovation arrangements. In particular, he studies the general theoretical insights into digital infrastructure innovation in the context of infrastructures based on distributed ledger technologies providing collectively agreed means of digital value exchange. Carsten convened the first LSE course dedicated to cryptocurrency and was instrumental in the LSE signing up to run a Hedera.com node. Dr Sørensen has since 1991 consulted and conducted executive teaching with a range of large international firms and public organisations, such as Microsoft, Google, PA Consulting Group, IMF, Orange, Intel, Vodafone, to name just a few.