Project description
Understanding digital-physical offerings' impact on industries
Industries use digitalisation to reduce resource consumption and enhance operational reliability. This involves participating in cross-industry business ecosystems and utilising digital data to connect various industries. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the ECOdig project will draw on strategy, information systems, and organisational theory to establish a framework that explains how organisations use digital data to create digital-physical offerings spanning multiple industries. This understanding of how organisations leverage digital data to enter and navigate industries is crucial to prevent the excessive dominance of tech platforms, given the distinct nature of digital competition compared to traditional strategies. ECOdig will use interviews, observations, and archival material gathered from two digital ecosystems actively working towards a dual digital/green transition.
Objective
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?
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesinternetinternet of things
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensors
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuels
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
1081 HV Amsterdam
Netherlands