IoT platform formation and stickiness: four cases

Opportunities for changing and sharing digital data give companies options for creating additional value for their customers (Kannan and Hongshuang, 2017) and a platform can be used for sharing data and other resources that can be used by the business partners in the value chain to co-create value together with the customers. A platform is seen as a configuration design for products, services and infrastructure, facilitating sup¬pliers, platform owners, customers interaction (Löf¬berg and Åkesson, 2018). The value creation process is complex and the platform needs to reflect this complexity, in form of advanced combination of physi¬cal products and software (service solutions). IoT provides the opportunity to create a number of different platforms (Boehmer, Shukla, Kapletia and Tiwari, 2020; Iivari et al., 2016) and different ways in building relationships, in form of stickiness, with its customers and suppliers (Hollensen et al., 2020). Platform stickiness is understood as: “[the] central actor’s ability to continuously attract new and maintain existing stakeholders within a platform through the effective orchestration of value co-creation” (Laczko et al., 2019, p. 216). This leads to the following research question:
How do manufacturers’ choice of positioning in the value chain influence the platform formation and stickiness with its customers and suppliers?
The research is explorative in nature. It involves a qualitative comparative case study with four cases (Eisenhardt, 1989; Eisenhardt and Graeber, 2007; Yin, 2017), and an abductive approach (Dubois and Gadde, 2002), i.e. combining empirical observations and literature concepts in an evolving manner in order to develop descriptive theory based on perceived ‘best explanation’ through observation, categorization, and association (Christensen, 2006). The research will show four different IoT platform formations and discuss the implications of the manufacture’s choice of positioning on the IoT platform regarding stickiness with the customers and suppliers.