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Starting from the foundations of value innovation, this paper aims to give an idea of the key drivers and barriers – internal and external to the company – and to provide insight into proven capabilities underscoring the ability to create a flow of new value initiatives. These thoughts are then confronted with the present challenges of Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The confrontation leads to the identification of five capabilities for future-proof value innovation.

Literature review based upon the work of the author with more than two decades of experience within value innovation research is included. The review is supplemented with recent literature and an overview of the challenges of Industry 4.0/IIoT, which leads into a confrontation of the present status of value innovation with future requirements.

Value innovation remains important specifically for established companies facing path-breaking digital disruption of their existing business models provoked by Industry 4.0 and IIoT. Five key capabilities are suggested to rejuvenate value innovation and prepare it for the Industry 4.0 challenge: capabilities for designing, adapting and marketing product service systems; capabilities for blending digital strategy and processes with value offerings; capabilities for designing and mobilizing ecosystems and integrating these into a value-based IIoT platform; capabilities for combining and integrating technological and value innovation approaches; and capabilities for linking value creation to value capturing.

This paper is more of a “viewpoint” than an empirically based paper presenting new research findings. It is based on expert judgment and confrontation with extant literature. The outlook indicating five key capabilities needs further empirical corroboration.

The overview of barriers and the “toolkit” for value innovation (Figure 1) and the five capabilities for future value innovation are expected to be managerially relevant.

The paper highlights the concept of value innovation, as discussed over the past decades, and links it to recent challenges and opportunities imposed by Industry 4.0 and the IIoT. The concept of value or strategic innovation is still valid but needs a re-conceptualization in view of these developments. The paper provides five capabilities business marketers should develop to perform value innovation in an Industry 4.0 environment.

This study aims to develop theory on the process toward digital service innovation (DSI) and to generate insights into how companies deal with the rising complexity associated with DSI, both inside and outside of the organization, through organizational learning and alignment.

After purposeful sampling, in-depth, longitudinal case studies of three manufacturers are presented as illustration. Per case, multiple semi-structured interviews are conducted, and insights are validated through rich additional data gathering. Each company's DSI pathway is reconstructed with critical incident technique. Next, using systematic combining, a middle-range theory is developed by proposing a theoretical frame concerning the relations between DSI maturity, learning and alignment.

The authors posit that, as companies gradually develop and progress toward DSI maturity, they deal with a rising degree of complexity, fueling their learning needs. Companies that are apt to learn, pass through multiple cycles of learning and alignment to overcome specific complexities associated with different DSI stages, with each cycle unlocking new DSI opportunities and challenges.

The study applies a stage-based view on DSI combined with complexity management and organizational learning and alignment theory. It offers a theoretical frame and propositions to be used by researchers for future DSI studies and by managers to evaluate alternative DSI strategies and implementation steps.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical lens on digital servitization (DS) for future research purposes. By developing a multilevel framework that helps structure and untangle its complexity, the authors aim to increase understanding into the persistent challenge of DS.

Building on a problematization approach, critical incident technique was applied to a comparative, longitudinal, multiple-case study in which DS journeys from one Italian and one Belgian manufacturing firm were analyzed.

Analysis revealed that different levels and elements of the multilevel framework were simultaneously involved in the identified critical incidents. This huge interconnectedness severely challenged the DS journeys. Managerial (un)responsiveness played a central role in the organizational outcome for both firms.

The authors answer the call for a more holistic approach toward DS. A multilevel framework is provided to be employed by future researchers and practitioners alike. A mid-range theory for DS and propositions for future research are developed.

This study aims to investigate the impact of an institutionalized market context on platform ecosystem development. It studies how platform ecosystems are set up and evolve in the asset management industry and explores the role of the platform leader and selected core network partners in unleashing value innovation notwithstanding institutional barriers. A problematization lens is used to identify deviations between the management practices in this industry setting and the prescriptions and suggested practices in the extant literature on platform ecosystem development.

The research follows a retrospective longitudinal single-case design focusing on the development of a new platform ecosystem to which several PaaS initiatives are linked. It is based on 13 in-depth interviews over a one-year period triangulated with documentation and member checks. This study identifies the impact of regulations and norms on the early stages of platform ecosystem development.

In this institutionalized market, intensified interactions between carefully selected strategic market players focusing on platform development, lead to growing value innovation initiatives. The collaboration between core actors evolves “under the radar” with select partners and with lots of controls by incumbents. The value innovation process evolves in a non-disruptive way. Initially, the new value initiatives are rather incremental and focus on optimizing the present business models while slowly adding new peripheral services shared as successful signs of value innovation initiatives. This “submerged” direction enables platform actors to gather critical mass and stimulates co-evolution with key players.

This paper outlines one vertical and looks at various principles involved during early stages of platform development. Because the authors have chosen a deep dive into one institutionalized setting, future studies could investigate a broader scope of institutionalized settings/verticals and a broader scope of management stages and related practices to replicate the study and corroborate the findings. The idea raised from hybrid platform ecosystem development also warrants further study.

Practitioners in institutionalized business-to-business markets find suggestions on how to overcome institutional barriers to platform ecosystem development and this study shows which levers can be used by core actors of ecosystems to strengthen established business models and simultaneously unleash value innovation initiatives.

This study contributes to the understanding of the challenges to be faced when setting up and expanding platform ecosystems in a highly institutionalized setting and identifies “levers” to create a smooth flow and snowball effect for platform ecosystem development. It “fine-tunes” the extant literature on platform ecosystem development to institutionalized markets.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the importance of good coordination between marketing and sales. It aims to examine the research conducted to date, the area of marketing and sales integration and provide guidance to help integrate these functional areas better in industrial marketing firms. The paper seeks to develop a research agenda to continue this research.

A total of 21 interviews were collected through the use of qualitative research techniques and intensive interviews. The interactions between marketing and sales were modeled for during the marketing management process and the sales management process.

More extensive sample surveys need to be conducted. Exploratory findings should be tested and possible situational differences identified.

Several required actions were identified for management. These fall into three categories: organizational design; communication; and human resources management. The primary suggestions are to make sure: product management functions effectively as a coordination mechanism; there is central coordination; the organizational structure is customer‐centric; communication is timely and of high quality; and everyone in sales and marketing has an appreciation of the other role.

The research provides one of the earliest efforts to examine this important area from an empirical perspective and provide guidance to marketing and sales managers.

Although built to explain an inherently dynamic process, current theories of internationalization are criticized for having limited dynamic qualities. To come to this conclusion, we adopt international market withdrawal as an empirical extreme. We expect dynamic theories of internationalization to be able to accommodate and explain international market withdrawal within the scope of the internationalization process of the firm. An integrated global strategy framework is presented as a promising point of departure toward this aim. To assess this framework's dynamic qualities, we compare it with the ‘stages’ models of internationalization and the transaction-cost based international business theory. Although this integrated global strategy framework — and especially the resource-based part of it — seems to outperform these two established theories, the framework is not capable of fully explaining the dynamics in the internationalization process of the firm. Moreover, the integrated global strategy framework struggles with the paradigmatic incompatibilities among its fundamental explananda. Adopting the resource-based perspective as a pivotal point, we propose an (emergent) resource-based evolutionary theory of the firm as a dynamic framework that is capable of explaining international market withdrawal and the internationalization process of the firm.