Strategic Alliances, Platforms and Ecosystems for the Digital Transformation of Industrial Firms

During the fourth industrial revolution, industrial firms have begun to carry out transformation projects that should allow the firms to change their manufacturing systems towards connected and digitally optimized structures. This is also linked to the general digital transformation wave to implement digital business models. With an overall goal of becoming digitally integrated firms that can use digital technologies for efficiency improvements in all of their operations, industrial firms therefore undergo a continuous change process.
It might be necessary for them to adapt both their stakeholder management and business models accordingly: investors will expect their firms to take up new digital trends in order to remain competitive, such as platform solutions for the introduction of the Industrial Internet of Things; the state legislators are constantly working on new regulatory initiatives to keep pace with the technological progress, like Artificial Intelligence; and novel inter-organizational relationships between industrial firms and other organizations in their innovation ecosystems, such as new market entrants like Amazon, or non-profit platforms like the Munich Security Conference, introduce new ways of collaboration and alliance building. All of this is encouraged by public sector initiatives and an increasing role of the government as facilitator.

The proposed PhD research will empirically examine strategic alliances, platforms and ecosystems that are formed to advance digital transformation processes of industrial firms. It will try to identify unique attributes and behaviour patterns of stakeholders that are necessary to consider in large-scale transformation projects and it aims to develop a framework for improved stakeholder management performance in such cases by taking the relative importance of relevant stakeholder groups into account. With recent numbers suggesting that more than 70% of digital transformation projects fail, the PhD research will identify different modes of inter-organizational collaboration that have the potential to support industrial firms in the adoption of digital technologies, either for their own value chain or as enablers of new business models. A particular focus will be the collaboration with the public sector and other non-private actors, and to describe their role in successful ecosystem formation. Therefore, the research can be embedded in existing approaches of explaining firm performance with stakeholder management models (see Berman et al., 1999). This will allow to contribute to the literature on strategic stakeholder management, as well as organizational and digital transformation.
Its methodological basis will be grounded in a qualitative approach, through multiple case studies following Yin (2003) and Eisenhardt (1989), described by semi-structured interviews and potentially extended into social network analysis (see Scott, 1988) or an ecosystem approach (see Jacobides, Cennamo and Gawer, 2018). In the centre of the case studies should be industrial firms across Europe and emerging initiatives to connect these organizations. The case-study approach has proven its usefulness to describe stakeholder systems in infrastructure projects in the past (cf. Lienert, Schnetzer and Ingold, 2013) and will be applied for an analysis of inter-organizational networks such as strategic alliances, platforms and ecosystems in the industrial context. In line with prior methodological approaches of research in the field of information systems, a theoretical lens is applied that considers the formation of these novel forms of inter-organizational relationships as driver of a "new digital age" (cf. Schmidt and Cohen, 2013), in which technological progress is increasingly considered to be creating a global tech race.