The executives’ multi-stakeholder view on digital transformation of value creation and capture

Corporate digital transformation aims to increase total value creation but often fails. We examine digital transformation from an executive view to understand what value creation and value capture interests different stakeholders hold, how they assess the corporation’s digital transformation through these interests, and what frictions arise when interests diverge. We study three large companies and their stakeholders: customers, capital providers, suppliers, partners and complementors, and managers and employees. Our findings show that digital transformation activates heterogeneous stakeholder interests and that divergent assessments generate intra- and inter-stakeholder frictions that reduce value capture and can erode total value creation. Cooperative game theory helps explain why these outcomes occur by distinguishing total value creation from the distribution of value capture among interdependent stakeholders. We contribute by providing an executive-grounded mapping of stakeholder value interests and a friction-based explanation for why digital transformations stall even when strategic intent is clear.