Strategies for Digitalization in Manufacturing Firms

By Joakim Björkdahl. 2020

464 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article discusses the digitalization efforts of 26 leading manufacturing firms, the difficulties encountered, and how they can be handled. It shows that many firms are far from ready to benefit from digitalization and are mainly focused on achieving greater efficiency through digitalization rather than pursuing a growth agenda. This imbalance is because of the difficulties related to identifying profitable configurations of competencies, assets, and data generated from digital technologies, orchestrating them, and exploiting them in an agile organization. Practical implications of digitalization are highlighted, specifically in terms of strategies for supporting the current business and embracing long-term digital transformation.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/335652f885bdf32475a5b6d66618511dfa94676c

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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

In Management Information Systems

Citations in the corpus

Co-evolution of platform architecture, platform services, and platform governance: Expanding the platform value of industrial digital platforms (2021, background): “More specifically, for manufacturers, a large part of the technological setup and digital knowledge may lie outside their organizational boundaries, which contributes to greater dependency on the surrounding digital ecosystem (Björkdahl, 2020; Hanelt et al., 2020).”
How can SMEs successfully navigate VUCA environment: The role of agility in the digital transformation era (2022, background): “In particular, organizational agility has been associated with improved financial performance in SMEs: the ability to quickly seize opportunities gives agile companies, in particular small and medium-sized enterprises, a first mover advantage that allows higher returns (Liu and Yang, 2019; 2020).”
COVID-19 and digitalization: The great acceleration (2021, background): “Digitalizing at least part of the organizational and business model is increasingly ubiquitous and holds the prospect that firms can accrue efficiency gains through even modest changes (Bjorkdahl, 2020).”
How open is innovation? A retrospective and ideas forward (2021, background): “Such business models often rest on the firm’s ability to generate and handle massive amounts of data—supported by technologies previously not available (e.g., Björkdahl, 2020; Loebbecke and Picot, 2015; Sjödin, Parida, Jovanovic, and Visnjic, 2020).”
Identifying Digital Transformation Paths in the Business Model of SMEs during the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “In this study, it was found that the digital transformation of SMEs operating in creative industries does not necessarily involve radical business model transformation; the transformation can be implemented gradually and at different levels of changes [1].”
The Effects of Digital Transformation on Firm Performance: Evidence from China’s Manufacturing Sector (2021, methodology): “Third, services carrying digital technologies will be fostered during DT. Servicization may ﬁrst arise by providing operational and supplementary services for smart products [32].”
Digital transformation in business and management research: An overview of the current status quo (2022, background): “Bjorkdahl (2020) discussed the digitalization efforts of a set of leading manufacturing firms, the difficulties encountered there, and how they can be handled.”