Innovation of meaning in two-sided markets : how to attract the second side ?

Two of the main topic studied nowadays by the researchers all around the world, are the Innovation of Meaning and the Two-Sided Market. This is the answer to the rising trends: • The first one is the application of the Design strategies to introduce new products or services in the market, thus trying to develop new breakthrough Innovation of Meaning able to generate new reason why in the customers. • The second one is the rising number of platforms which are appearing in the market, aiming to facilitate and regulate the trade between different individuals all around the world, acting in the so called Two-Sided Market. While many things have been said in the Literature regarding the Innovation of Meaning and the Two-Sided Market, it seems that none of the existing articles are linking these two topics. This study aims to understand the main consequences and the way to introduce such an Innovation in a complex environment like the one of the Two-Sided Market, where the platform has to satisfy not just one, but more group of customers at the same time. The research is based on the study of five web-based platforms through both, secondary and primary sources, which had been able to reach the success in their fields through the introduction of a radical Innovation of Meaning. The main result regards how the Innovation of Meaning should be declined on both the sides of the platforms. Indeed, if it is true that the general idea of Innovation of Meaning could create new “reasons why” for the customers of the first side, is not true that this idea could be valuable for the customer of the second side too. In order to make the idea feasible and sustainable, a good way to result appealing to the Second Side is to provide them One Side Value Added Services. Another remarkable point is given by the consequences that an Innovation of Meaning could have on the mechanism which are regulating the Two-Sided Market, in particular we focused on the pricing method and on the Network Externalities. We show that, after the introduction of the Innovation, it seems that none of the laws provided by the literature are valid anymore, giving birth to new mechanism to set the price and to choose the Second-Side.