Application and validation of a disruptive potential methodology for digital two-sided platforms-the case of marketplace lending in Germany

In this paper, we apply and validate a state of the art ex-ante approach to analyse potentially disruptive innovations. Our approach enables quantifying the disruptive potential of digital two-sided platforms as a measure in general, separately for each market side, and for different market players. This approach also pays attention to possible firm heterogeneity on each market side. We illustrate our approach by applying it to and evaluating the case of marketplace lending in Germany in 2015 and 2019. Following the first application of the framework in 2015, the market has developed to such an extent that the ex-ante analysis can be evaluated with ex-post figures and facts from 2019. The results indicate that the proposed framework supports predictions of the disruptive potential in the context of digital two-sided platforms surprisingly accurately, so that we encourage further validations in other areas of ex-ante innovation research.