Becoming a keystone: How incumbents can leverage technological change to create ecosystems
Doktorsavhandling, 2022

The proliferation of digital technology and automation in the 21st century has created a need to revisit established theories on value creation. Exponential advances in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are dismantling firm- and industry-specific value creation processes. The firms developing digital technology-based products and services typically participate in broad networks, which allows them to integrate distinct systems and technologies to produce a focal value proposition. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how incumbents can leverage technological change to create an innovation ecosystem. 

The concept of an innovation ecosystem is a powerful analogy to explain value co-creation in a network. In general, ecosystems are broad cooperative networks, in which the actors coalesce organically and co-evolve through the construction of a value proposition. Although several scholars have studied value co-creation in an ecosystem, few have explored the process of ecosystem emergence. Also, extant research on ecosystem primarily investigates orchestration capabilities from the perspective of technology firms or new entrants that emerge within an ecosystem. Few empirical studies investigate how incumbent firms can co-create value and develop capabilities to orchestrate an ecosystem as a keystone actor.

In this context, this thesis investigates a manufacturing firm’s efforts to develop a new technology. The research was designed as an ethnographic in-depth case study of Volvo Car Group, an incumbent in the automotive industry. The thesis employs a qualitative abductive research approach to explore the collaborations related to the development of AD technology, a discontinuous technological change for incumbent automotive firms. Based on a four-year longitudinal case study and findings from four papers, the thesis makes important contributions to scholarly understanding of ecosystem emergence in traditional industries.

This thesis makes three main contributions to literature on innovation ecosystems: (1) it describes ‘layered modularity’ as a design mechanism that facilitates joint value creation leading to the emergence of an innovation ecosystem, (2) it shows how developing physical products (such as devices or hardware platforms) and digital systems (such as IoT technologies or software) in distinct layers allows intertwining of divergent innovation activities and
development methods, (3) it distinguishes between three distinct activities – cooperation, coordination and competition – that incumbents firms need to manage in order to become a keystone actor and orchestrate the ecosystem. The findings presented in this thesis have important implications for manufacturing firms looking to leverage a DTC to create new ecosystems.

Innovation ecosystem

discontinuous technological change

modularity

case study

TME Room Götaplatsen V2-2427C, Vera Sandbergs Allé 8, Göteborg
Opponent: Professor Paavo Ritala, Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT, Finland

Författare

Gouthanan Pushpananthan

Chalmers, Teknikens ekonomi och organisation, Innovation and R&D Management

Joining forces to create value: The emergence of an innovation ecosystem

Technovation,;Vol. 115(2022)

Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift

Pushpananthan, G. and Elmquist, M. Keystone orchestration in an emerging ecosystem: The case of autonomous drive technology development in Sweden

The emergence of new innovation ecosystem

R&D Today,;(2019)

Artikel i övrig tidskrift

Since Adam Smith’s use of a pin factory as a metaphor for division of labour, value creation is conceived as a linear system where one firm’s output serves as another firm’s input. However, in today’s digital economy, the boundaries between the physical and digital are disappearing and innovation is no longer a firm or industry specific activity. Increasingly, incumbent manufacturing firms are disrupted due to digitalization of industries and products. Some famous examples are analog and digital photography, fax machines and internet communication, and bank cheque books and online banking. These examples show that large multinational firms do not dominate research on new technologies, instead, it is technology firms and startups that dominate the innovation landscape.
 
Thus, the future of industrial production involves not just developing physical products and related services. It will also be about leveraging digital technologies and exploiting data to foster continuous innovation and generating complementarities. The ‘ecosystem’ analogy is particularly useful to study digital technologies and platforms where actors from multiple industries, including competitor, co-create value. The concept of innovation ecosystem (IE), in particular, has gained traction in the past decade with the increasing use of ‘ecosystem’ metaphor in studying innovation in the 21stcentury.
 
Based on a longitudinal case study of an automotive firm, the thesis explains the role of ‘layered modularity’ in facilitating value co-creation in industrial ecosystems. By studying various activities, undertaken by an incumbent firm during a discontinuous technological change, the thesis describes the process of ecosystem emergence. Further, the thesis makes contributions associated with the capabilities needed to orchestrate an innovation ecosystem. The findings presented in this thesis have several implications for industries looking to leverage their product platforms into value co-creation ecosystems.

Styrkeområden

Transport

Ämneskategorier

Annan teknik

Ekonomi och näringsliv

Drivkrafter

Innovation och entreprenörskap

ISBN

978-91-7905-632-2

Doktorsavhandlingar vid Chalmers tekniska högskola. Ny serie: 5098

Utgivare

Chalmers

TME Room Götaplatsen V2-2427C, Vera Sandbergs Allé 8, Göteborg

Online

Opponent: Professor Paavo Ritala, Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT, Finland

Mer information

Senast uppdaterat

2023-11-09