Design Elements of a Platform-Based Ecosystem for Industry Applications

Abstract

Many companies in the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) environment are still lacking knowledge and experience of how to enter and participate in a platform-based ecosystem to gain long-term competitive advantages. This leads to uncertainty among firms when transforming into platform-based ecosystems. The article presents a structuralist approach to conceptualize the platform-based ecosystem construct, giving an overview of the literature landscape in a model bundled with unified terminology and different perspectives. The holistic process model aggregates the findings of 130 papers regarding platform-based ecosystem literature. It consists of 4 phases and 16 design elements that unify different terminologies from various research disciplines in one framework and provide a structured and process-oriented approach. Besides, use cases for different design elements were developed to make the model apply in an I4.0 context. Use Case I is a methodology that can be used to model and validate usage hypotheses based on usage data to derive optimization potential from identified deviations from real product usage. By collecting and refining data for analyzing different manufacturing applications and machine tool behavior the importance of specific data is shown in Use Case II and it is highlighted which data can be shared from an external perspective. Use Case III deals with strategic modeling of platform-based ecosystems and the research identifies control points that platform players can actively set to adjust their business models within alliance-driven cooperation to create and capture value jointly. Use Case IV investigates the status quo and expectations regarding platform-based ecosystems in the field of laser technology with the help of structured expert interviews. Overall, this chapter presents a framework on industrial platform-based ecosystems that gives researchers and practitioners a tool and specific examples to get started in this emerging topic.