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

工业企业数字化转型的战略联盟、平台和生态系统

基本信息

批准号：
2481898
负责人：
金额：
--
依托单位：
University of Cambridge
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Studentship
财政年份：
2021
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2021 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2481898
关键词：
Strategic Alliances Platforms Ecosystems Digital

项目摘要

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.

在第四次工业革命期间，工业公司已经开始进行转型项目，这些项目应允许公司将其制造系统更改为连接和数字优化的结构。这也与实施数字业务模型的一般数字转型浪潮有关。总体目标是成为数字综合的公司，这些公司可以使用数字技术来提高其所有运营的效率，因此工业公司会经历持续的变更过程。他们可能有必要相应地调整其利益相关者的管理和业务模式：投资者将期望其公司采用新的数字趋势以保持竞争力，例如用于引入工业互联网的平台解决方案；州议员一直在努力采取新的监管计划，以跟上人工智能等技术进步。以及创新生态系统中工业公司与其他组织之间的新型组织间关系，例如亚马逊等新市场参与者，或慕尼黑安全会议等非营利性平台，介绍了新的合作和联盟建设方式。所有这些都受到公共部门倡议的鼓励，并且是政府作为促进者的越来越多的作用。拟议的博士研究将凭经验研究旨在推进工业公司数字化转型过程的战略联盟，平台和生态系统。它将尝试确定在大规模转型项目中需要考虑的利益相关者的独特属性和行为模式，并旨在通过考虑相关利益相关者群体的相对重要性来开发改善利益相关者管理绩效的框架。最近的数字表明，超过70％新业务模型的推动者。一个特别的重点将是与公共部门和其他非私人参与者的合作，并描述其在成功的生态系统形成中的作用。因此，该研究可以嵌入使用利益相关者管理模型来解释公司绩效的现有方法中（见Berman等，1999）。这将允许为有关战略利益相关者管理以及组织和数字化转型的文献做出贡献。它的方法论基础将通过Yin（2003）和Eisenhardt（1989）的多种案例研究以定性方法为基础，并通过半结构化访谈描述，并有可能扩展到社交网络分析中（请参阅Scott，1988）或生态系统方法（参见生态系统方法（参见Jacobides，Cennamo和Gawer，2018年）。在案例研究的中心，应是整个欧洲的工业公司，以及与这些组织联系的新兴计划。案例研究的方法证明了其过去在基础设施项目中描述利益相关者系统的有用性（参见Lienert，Schnetzer和Ingold，2013年），并将用于分析组织间网络，例如战略联盟，平台和生态系统在工业环境中。根据信息系统领域的研究方法学方法，应用理论镜头，它考虑了这些新型组织间关系形式的形成作为“新数字时代”的驱动力（参见Schmidt和Cohen，2013年），越来越多地认为技术进步正在创造全球技术竞赛。