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

在第四次工业革命期间，工业企业已开始实施转型项目，使企业能够将其制造系统转变为互联和数字化优化的结构。因此，工业企业的总体目标是成为能够利用数字技术提高所有运营效率的数字集成公司，因此经历了一个持续的变化过程。他们可能有必要相应地调整利益相关者管理和商业模式：投资者将期望他们的公司采用新的数字趋势，以保持竞争力；州立法机构正在不断制定新的监管举措，以跟上技术进步的步伐，如人工智能；工业公司与其创新生态系统中的其他组织之间的新型组织间关系，例如亚马逊等新的市场进入者，或慕尼黑安全会议等非营利性平台，引入了新的协作方式和联盟建设。所有这一切都受到公共部门倡议和政府日益增长的促进者作用的鼓励。拟议的博士研究将对为推进工业企业数字化转型进程而形成的战略联盟、平台和生态系统进行实证研究。它将努力确定在大型转型项目中有必要考虑的利益攸关方独特的属性和行为模式，其目的是通过考虑到相关利益攸关方群体的相对重要性，制定一个在这种情况下改进利益攸关方管理业绩的框架。最近的数据表明，超过70%的数字转型项目失败了，博士研究将确定不同的组织间合作模式，这些模式有可能支持工业企业采用数字技术，无论是为了它们自己的价值链，还是作为新商业模式的推动者。一个特别的重点将是与公共部门和其他非私营行为者的合作，并说明它们在成功形成生态系统方面的作用。因此，这项研究可以嵌入到用利益相关者管理模型解释企业绩效的现有方法中(见Berman等人，1999)。这将有助于编写关于战略利益攸关方管理以及组织和数字转型的文献。它的方法论基础将建立在定性方法的基础上，通过Yen(2003)和Eisenhardt(1989)之后的多个案例研究，通过半结构化访谈进行描述，并可能扩展到社会网络分析(见Scott，1988)或生态系统方法(见Jacobids，Cennamo和Gawer，2018)。案例研究的中心应该是欧洲各地的工业企业以及连接这些组织的新兴倡议。过去，案例研究方法已证明其在描述基础设施项目中的利益相关者系统方面是有用的(参看。Lienert、Schnetzer和InGold，2013年)，并将用于分析组织间网络，如工业背景下的战略联盟、平台和生态系统。按照以前在信息系统领域研究的方法论方法，采用了一种理论视角，认为这些新形式的组织间关系的形成是“新数字时代”的驱动力(参见。施密特和科恩，2013)，其中技术进步越来越被认为正在创造一场全球技术竞赛。

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.