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The Marshall Van Alstyne Conversation
Marshall Van Alstyne is co-author of the international bestseller Platform Revolution. He is one of the world’s experts on network business models and is Questrom Professor of Management at Boston University. He is a frequent speaker, board level advisor, and consultant to startups and global firms. His research has received over 20,000 Google Scholar citations and won half a dozen academic awards.
Together with Geoffrey Parker and Nobel Laureate Jean Tirole, he developed the concept of two-sided markets, which is used extensively in platform business models. He has been a major contributor to the theory of network effects, a set of ideas now taught worldwide. His co-authored article on the subject is a Harvard Business Review top 50 of all time.
Parker and Van Alstyne co-founded the MIT Platform Summit and Boston University Symposium, which they have co-chaired since 2013. In 2019, Thinkers 50 gave to Parker and Van Alstyne the "Best Digital Thinking" Award across all management scholarship and continued to rank them among the top 50 thinkers globally in 2021 (https://thinkers50.com/biographies/marshall-van-alstyne-geoff-parker/).
He received a BA in computer science from Yale and an MS and PhD. in information systems economics from MIT. He holds multiple patents – he was among the first to measure the dollar value of social networks – and his theories of network businesses are taught worldwide.
