How does the digital data-layer of digital-physical products and services shape collaboration and competition in industry-spanning ecosystems?

Digitalization of industry, such as smart industry solutions, promises society sustainability and prosperity.

To reduce resource consumption and increase operations’ reliability, organizations deploy digital technologies to monitor, control, optimize, and automate existing physical operations (e.g. sensors in factories for efficient production, maintenance, and IoT services).

This often requires organizations to build or join industry-spanning business ecosystems, where the data-layer of the digital-physical offerings acts as “portal” connecting organizations across different industries (hardware/engineering, software/IT). Yet, we know little about how digital data enable these connections and how this shapes competitive dynamics.

Furthermore, organizations have different origins, sizes, and structures, which fuels innovation but also confers unequal opportunities.

This poses challenges to policymaking, because the emergence of industry-spanning ecosystems redistributes market dominance, so that powerful incumbents may block initiatives to remain dominant. To avoid a build-up of power by a few tech-platforms (e.g.

Google, Amazon), we need to understand how different types of organizations use digital data and how differences shape ecosystem emergence and management.

This is important, because competition based on digital data likely takes different forms than “traditional” strategies.

Building on strategy, information systems, and organizational theory, this project develops an inductive framework to explain how digital data allow organizations to devise digital-physical offerings that straddle multiple industries.

Based on interviews, observations, and archival materials in two digitalizing ecosystems that tackle this twin digital/green transition, this research answers the question: how does the digital data layer of digital-physical offerings allow organizations to enter and traverse industries, and what are the organizational and strategic implications?