The collection and analysis of industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) data offer numerous opportunities for value creation, particularly in manufacturing industries. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), many of those opportunities are inaccessible without cooperation across enterprise borders and the sharing of data, personnel, finances, and IT resources. In this study, we suggest so-called data cooperatives as a novel approach to such settings. A data cooperative is understood as a legal unit owned by an ecosystem of cooperating SMEs and founded for supporting the members of the cooperative. In a series of 22 interviews, we developed a concept for cooperative IIoT ecosystems that we evaluated in four workshops, and we are currently implementing an IIoT ecosystem for the coolant management of a manufacturing environment. We discuss our findings and compare our approach with alternatives and its suitability for the manufacturing domain.
There is a variety of reasons that sharing data among Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) carries business potential, particularly for analytical applications. But outside a few niche domains, the number of success stories for data sharing is rather modest. Based on a qualitative study and first experiences from a research project with pilot implementations, we argue that this is mainly due to a lack of an institutionalized governance structure: Founding a separate legal entity for data sharing and analysis can address core concerns regarding sharing valuable data assets. However, this requires a well-calibrated set of defined roles for the involved partners. Based on our results we propose a first concept on delineating and mapping out those roles.
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