The journey to become an ecosystem orchestrator for an Internet of Things (IoT) platform poses considerable strategic challenges for industry incumbents, which arise along three dimensions: platform, ecosystem and value co-creation. We describe how “TelcoCorp,” a large European telecoms operator, addressed these challenges as it established its enterprise IoT platform ecosystem. Based on the TelcoCorp case study, we provide recommendations that IT and business executives can use to become orchestrators in the IoT instead of fearing platform competition.

Christian Marheine, Christian Engel, Andrea Back

2021