This month’s issue of the HBR’s Spotlight was on the subject of how platforms are reshaping business. The subject of platforms are exciting from a technical standpoint as they require very little physical infrastructure and if engineered properly can be scaled orders of magnitude to accommodate rapid growth. From a business mindset owning a successful platform can be perceived as a mechanism to generating seemingly effortless wealth; scaling costs can be fractional to the revenue return on an exponentially growing user base of producers and consumers. The players of a good platform are manifold and can provide meaningful value to all, each in its own way.

I was at the magazine rack at a Chapters the other day in hopes of discovering a new publication to add to my readings, low and behold I found two: MIT Technology Review, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. If a pattern in my magazine choices has become evident, I guess I’ll admit to being a sucker to the weight of big university names. In any case I skimmed a few articles in each and found a breadth of interesting topics and so I picked the two up. Below are some of the highlights of my readings thus far.

In what I hope to be a recurring blog entry category I will comment on and/or highlight aspects of readings that I have found to contain meaningful insight on subjects that pertain to my professional ambitions and experiences. In doing so I hope to extract additional value from readings that may too quickly slip from memory after only one read through.