Enabling collaboration on digital platforms: a study of digital twins

Digital platforms are transforming almost every industry today and are expected to revolutionize future value creation. Digital platforms require collaboration, but this is challenging especially in the manufacturing industry where sensitive data need shared and high investments are required. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to enhance the understanding of how to successfully collaborate on digital platforms in the manufacturing industry by developing a contingency framework. The study is an explorative single case study of a digital platform. More specifically, the study examined the development process of a digital twin platform created by a large high-technological company and its collaborative actors. The results are based on 21 semi-structured interviews and reveals that actors on digital platforms can face five types of challenges that hinder a successful collaboration: disadvantages of dependency, uncertainty regarding data management, varying customer needs, insufficient work methods, and unsuitable payment models. The analysis also reveals four strategies that can be used to address the challenges: transparency strategy, incentive model strategy, servitization strategy, and control strategy. Moreover, these findings are summarized in a contingency framework that explains which types of challenges that can be addressed with which strategies based on the specific prerequisites of each collaboration.