Fähnrich, NicolasKubach, MichaelFritsch, LotharRoßnagel, HeikoHühnlein, Detlef2017-08-282017-08-282017978-3-88579-671-8Platforms are becoming an increasingly important part of today’s and future innovations. However, from a privacy and security, as well as from a societal perspective, closed proprietary platforms, the currently dominant form, possess certain potentially problematic features. This is why many call for open ecosystem approaches that so far have had only limited success on the market. In order to design an open ecosystem platform in a way that is attractive to companies, we therefore analyze the role platforms and related aspects play in companies’ strategies. This is achieved through an analysis of the annual corporate reports of large companies. Results show that platforms are a common topic in all industry sectors, with closed proprietary approaches prevailing. This illustrates that open ecosystem approaches are still hardly considered by the big industry players and more efforts are needed to make them economically attractive.enopen ecosystemplatformInternet of ThingsIoTsmart assistantsassistance systemscontent analysis1617-5468