Industry 4.0 innovation ecosystems: An evolutionary perspective on value cocreation

Industry 4.0 considers complex interrelated IoT-based technologies for the provision of digital solutions. Such a complexity demands a vast set of capabilities that are hard to be found in a single technology provider, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Innovation ecosystems allow SMEs to integrate resources and cocreate Industry 4.0 solutions. We aim to understand how such ecosystems can consolidate and evolve, and how value is cocreated within them. We adopt a social exchange perspective to consider the relationships in the ecosystem across six structural dimensions and three lifecycle stages. We analyze eleven years of an ecosystem's evolution using a technology mapping of 87 companies, 37 interviews with stakeholders, and a 2.5-year follow-up of a testbed project conducted by 8 companies. Our final framework shows that the ecosystem's mission shifted from accessing innovation funds to Industry 4.0 solution cocreation and, then, to smart business solutions cocreation. As trust and commitment grew, the power structure shifted from the centrality of business association toward a mechanism of neutral coordination of complex projects involving the university and business associations and, lastly, to a platform-driven ecosystem structure, where key technologies emerged as drivers of relationships among the companies and value cocreation. We also show the changes of reciprocity between actors, as well as in value exchange and expected rewards from the social exchange. Managers can learn how to establish technology development strategies in Industry 4.0 ecosystems, while policymakers can learn how to organize the evolution of such ecosystems.