Developing and leveraging platforms in a traditional industry: An orchestration and co-creation perspective

In the current fast-changing and digitalizing world, ever more firms active in traditional industries are transforming themselves into ‘Smart Factories’. Within their value chains, manufacturers are shifting from working at arm's length with other firms, to creating integrated platforms. These are composed of co-creating and collaborating actors. Even though the opportunities and competitive advantages of platforms for industrial applications have been proven, insights in the lead actors' efforts to ensure co-evolution of the platform and the platform actors' contributions to value co-creation are scarce. That way, the full potential of collaborative firm settings might not be realized. Addressing this gap, we explore through a multiple case study how manufacturers in the traditional Chinese textile industry gradually adopt a platform-based logic. This results in an integrative framework unfolding the lead actor's orchestration capabilities to ensure co-evolution, and the prerequisites for value co-creation in a platform. As such, we adapt and extend the co-evolution concept mostly examined in a dyadic setting to a multiple actors' logic and answer calls for additional research on the micro-foundations of value co-creation in platforms.