Skift Take
This mashup of leaders in travel, media, commerce, and IT represents the cross-industry synergies fueling the rise of the digital platform economy. It also represents the growing link between smart city development and tourism, which is going to explode in 2016.
At last week's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, leaders from the world's most innovative digital and IT companies gathered for a panel discussion focusing on "A New Platform for the Digital Economy."
Panelists included Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder and CTO of Airbnb, and the CEOs for YouTube, Cisco, and Accenture. The session was designed to explore the future of the digital platform economy as an "ecosystem of value exchange."
The biggest value of the panel was bringing hospitality and tourism together with digital media, business, IT, and smart city infrastructure — all in one place.
The idea of cross pollinating disparate industries is fundamental to the platform economy, but it's rare to find top leaders in the travel industry having a dialogue about that with companies like Cisco in an open forum available to the public.
Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, moderated.
The Rise of Digital Platforms
The digitization of business, and the rise of peer-to-peer merchant systems facilitated by integrated layers of digital platforms, is impacting every business sector, including travel.
Ebay was one of the first mainstream examples of a company providing a public digital platform for user-generated content, so anyone could become an independent merchant and engage the global economy. Around the same time, social media platforms were evolving, where value exchange took the form of online network building for personal and professional development. Then Airbnb, Uber and similar sharing companies gave people a way to monetize their personal assets and services.
Eventual
