Managers increasingly seek ways to explore insights from data for business improvements and innovation. Data Analytics (DA) platforms hold promise for businesses, especially small businesses that cannot afford tailor-made proprietary analytics services. DA platforms offer generic analytics features to a pool of businesses, saving costs and enabling benchmarking. This paper explores value propositions and adoption challenges for small businesses regarding DA. The paper offers practical insights from designing and launching a DA platform targeting small businesses in the hospitality sector. The findings of our paper show that data analytics is potentially valuable for small businesses through insights into market and customer trends. Small businesses can leverage such insights to refine their offerings. Trust and privacy concerns in sharing data are key challenges holding back adoption. We proposed measures, especially privacy-preserving technologies, to mitigate the risk of tracing a specific enterprise's data shared on the DA platform. These measures assure businesses that data shared or analysed through the DA platform is not used to harm their competitive advantage. @en

Launching multi-sided platforms is challenging as providers have to gather a critical mass of users in multiple target groups. Various `launch strategies' can be derived from existing platform literature, such as price subsidization, platform openness and coring. However, studies on the utility of these launch strategies for informing design choices in practice are largely lacking. This paper evaluates the utility of launch strategies for a multi-sided platform offering data analytics functionality in the hospitality industry. Strategies are applied and evaluated over the time period covering the initial platform design, market introduction and the first year of operation. We find that especially coring strategies are helpful in informing initial platform design decisions. Pricing and onboarding strategies are helpful for informing design choices, but considerable exploration and adjustments were needed along the way to effectuate the strategies. Our study shows that launch strategies from literature cannot be readily applied in a practical case. Our findings provide a foundation for developing design theory on launching multi-sided platforms. We contribute to digital platform literature by providing in-depth insights into how to apply launch strategies for multi-sided platforms offering data analytics.@en