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

在第四次工业革命期间，工业企业已经开始实施转型项目，这些项目应该允许企业将其制造系统转变为连接和数字化优化的结构。这也与实现数字化商业模式的普遍数字化转型浪潮有关。工业企业的总体目标是成为能够利用数字技术提高所有业务效率的数字化集成企业，因此，工业企业经历了一个持续的变革过程。他们可能有必要相应地调整其利益相关者管理和商业模式：投资者将期望他们的公司采取新的数字趋势以保持竞争力，例如引入工业物联网的平台解决方案；州议员们不断制定新的监管举措，以跟上人工智能等技术进步的步伐；工业企业与其创新生态系统中的其他组织之间的新型组织间关系，例如像亚马逊这样的新市场进入者，或像慕尼黑安全会议这样的非营利平台，引入了新的合作和联盟建立方式。所有这些都受到公共部门倡议和政府作为促进者的作用日益增强的鼓励。拟议的博士研究将实证研究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。它将试图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，在这种情况下制定一个改进利益相关者管理绩效的框架。最近的数据表明，超过70%的数字化转型项目失败，博士研究将确定不同的组织间协作模式，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体的合作，并描述它们在成功形成生态系统方面的作用。因此，该研究可以嵌入到现有的用利益相关者管理模型解释公司绩效的方法中（见Berman et al., 1999）。这将有助于战略利益相关者管理的文献，以及组织和数字化转型。它的方法论基础将建立在定性方法的基础上，通过半结构化访谈描述的多个案例研究，并可能扩展到社会网络分析（见Scott， 1988）或生态系统方法（见Jacobides， Cennamo和Gawer， 2018）。案例研究的中心应该是欧洲各地的工业公司和连接这些组织的新兴举措。案例研究方法已被证明在过去的基础设施项目中描述利益相关者系统是有用的（参见Lienert， Schnetzer和Ingold， 2013），并将被应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。与信息系统领域先前的研究方法一致，本文采用了一种理论视角，将这些新形式的组织间关系的形成视为“新数字时代”的驱动力（参见Schmidt和Cohen， 2013），其中越来越多的人认为技术进步正在创造全球技术竞赛。

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.