Business Models for Platform Coops

What does it take for platform cooperatives not only to exist, but to thrive in competitive markets? This question was at the heart of the second edition of the Platform Coops Open Research Forum, where researchers, founders, and practitioners came together to explore markets, business models, and real-world opportunities for platform coops.

Rather than framing platform coops as “ethical alternatives” to Big Tech, the session focused on them as serious market actors: enterprises that fundamentally redesign how value is created, distributed, and sustained.

Case Study: Needs Map

A highlight of the session was the presentation by Ali Ercan Özgür, co-founder and CEO of Needs Map (Türkiye), joined by Berna Övül, Needs Map’s Deputy General Manager, who complemented the presentation. Together, they shared the rich and compelling story of Needs Map by tracing its evolution from an initial idea to a multifaceted platform addressing real social needs. Their presentation illustrated how a community-driven approach can grow into a complex ecosystem of services and initiatives, making Needs Map an outstanding and unique example of a cooperative-oriented business model in practice.

Needs Map demonstrates how a platform can:

• Respond directly to social needs
• Mobilize local resources
• Create measurable real-world impact

It stands as a powerful reminder that platform coops are not just theoretical constructs, but living systems that can evolve, adapt, and scale while staying grounded in their values.

In a second step, our co-host Anannya Bhowmik mapped the Needs Map case using a cooperative business canvas she has recently co-developed: the Platform Coops Compass. This exercise proved particularly valuable for participants who wanted to dig deeper into the platform’s ownership structures, governance mechanisms, and other specific dimensions of its platform architecture. We hope to share the Platform Coops Compass more widely once it is officially released.

From Values to Viability: The Cooperative Business DNA

We opened the canvas session with a simple but often overlooked premise: Platform coops don’t struggle to create value, but they struggle to model, sustain, and scale it. Traditional business frameworks rarely capture what makes them distinct. So we started by defining the core DNA of cooperative business:

• Make money without exploiting people or the planet – for the interest of the members
• Reinvest the majority of profits (≥50%)
• Ensure ownership & governance by those who create the value
• Compete in markets — while serving the commons
• Optimize for resilience, not exit

This reframes the role of profit itself: Not extraction, but circulation. Not short-term gain, but long-term stewardship.
It also highlights a structural tension:

The real challenge is not whether platform coops can generate value, but how they sustain and scale it within market conditions designed for a different logic.

Rethinking Business Models: Beyond the Standard Canvas

To address this gap, the forum introduced a landscape of complementary business modeling tools, presented by Platform Coops co-founders Andreas Arnold and Ela Kagel. Instead of relying on a single framework, platform coops can combine different perspectives depending on their goals and context.

1. The Business Model Canvas

The Business Model Canvas was developed by Alexander Osterwalder, together with Yves Pigneur. It was first introduced in Osterwalder’s 2004 PhD thesis and later popularized through their book Business Model Generation (2010), which turned the canvas into a widely used tool among entrepreneurs, startups, and organizations worldwide. The idea was to create a simple, visual framework to describe, design, and analyze how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.

It is still a very useful instrument, but limited when it comes to member-owned and purpose-driven orgs. It captures infrastructure and revenue logic, yet often misses governance, ownership, and long-term value distribution.

2. ICA Cooperative Values Charter

More than internal guidelines, these global principles by the International Cooperative Alliance function as explicit promises to members. The value proposition expands beyond products or services to include:

• Economic participation
• Self-determination
• Collective ownership
• Inter-cooperation (cooperation among coops)

3. SDG-Oriented Framing

By aligning with the United Nation’s global sustainability goals, platform coops position themselves as active agents of systemic change. In adhering to specific SDGs, they add  transparency, credibility, and measurable impact to their value proposition.

4. Ecodesign Canvas

The ecodesign directive by the European Union provides a useful framework to set mandatory ecological requirements for energy-using and energy-related products sold in all 27 member states. A crucial reminder: Up to 80% of environmental impact is determined at the design stage.
This shifts business modeling toward:

• Material choices, informed  e.g. by lifecycle analysis
• Energy use
• Repairability & reuse
• Circular systems

5. Platform Design Toolkit

The Platform Design Toolkit was created by Simone Cicero and Milan Guenther. They developed it as a practical framework to help organizations design, map, and understand platform-based business models, especially those involving multiple stakeholders, ecosystems, and network effects. The toolkit is closely associated with their work at Boundaryless and is further elaborated in their book Platform Design Toolkit.

Platform coops operate in multi-sided ecosystems. This toolkit expands the lens from linear value chains to:

• Stakeholder relationships
• Matching & coordination
• Network effects and collaboration

6. Cooperative Franchising Models

Instead of scaling through centralization, platform coops often grow through:

• Local replication
• Distributed ownership
• Context-specific adaptation

A well-known example is the emergence of the SMART freelancer cooperative, which scales across the EU by enabling local nodes rather than consolidating power.

Market Opportunities for Platform Coops

Our co-host Melike Kaplan provided a final impulse for our online discussion. She invited participants to reflect on market opportunities for Platform Coops and encouraged everyone to expand their perception of „economy“, particularly when it comes to business models that actively engage with social justice, environmental protection, social equality, and other so-called “externalities” of late-stage capitalism. In doing so, Melike shared a powerful reminder that business can actually do both: generate profit and address social challenges at the same time.