Collaboration on Internet of Things Platforms - An Exploratory Case Study in the Swedish Automotive Sector Analyzing Volvo's Connected Car

Sammanfattning: The automotive industry is going through major changes with the usage of connectivity in the car. The increasingly complex offerings cause companies to specialize, focus on their core strength and collaborate with other business players from different industries to stay competitive and innovative. Platform-centric business strategies evolve, which integrate the knowledge of different companies and facilitate collaboration between organizations. While the technical perspective on Internet of Things has received much attention, scholars have neglected the managerial perspective to this day. To profit from synergies and complementary resources, the dynamics of collaboration on Internet of Things platforms need to be addressed. This study sets out to address this gap of collaboration on Internet of Things specific platforms by conducting an exploratory case study including a pre- & main-study analyzing Volvo's Connected Car. To explore how the collaboration between actors in Internet of Things based platform-centric networks is performed, a total of 21 interviews over two rounds were conducted. A theoretical framework based on research within industry convergence, platform- centric networks and inter-organizational collaboration was applied. The study showed that static structuring devices are helpful but not sufficient to identify and describe collaboration patterns of actors on Internet of Things platforms. Collaboration must be differentiated within the platform according to use cases, separating actors according to specific offerings. Additionally, a dynamic view is necessary to characterize collaboration in different stages of maturity. Three collaboration patterns were identified: The Established Pattern, the Transitional Pattern and the Experimental Pattern. These patterns characterize the dynamics between the actors in the static use cases and outline varying collaboration settings, networks positions and roles as well as uncertainties in the collaboration. This study advances the nascent research field of collaboration on Internet of Things platforms by emphasizing the dynamic dimension of collaboration and presenting three collaboration patterns scholars can build upon and practitioners can use to tackle challenges in this field.