Strategic value creation practices of keystone companies

Abstract

Emerging technologies are transforming the world around us, making it more connected, digitalized and data-intensive. At the same time, the business environment is becoming more intelligent, high-speed and scalable. This significant change has forced increasing number of companies to collaborate with other organizations to remain competitive. The phenomenon has brought ecosystems at the core of corporate strategy. Business ecosystems are networks of numerous interconnected firms and other organizations that aim at innovations and commercial success by collaborating and sharing value. In healthcare, ecosystems have been argued to help overcome innovation related issues by enabling organizations to jointly exploit the opportunities of emerging technologies.

The purpose of an ecosystem culminates in jointly creating and sharing more value than any company could achieve alone. Keystone companies are the most remarkable members of ecosystems, around which ecosystems are formed and whose contributions are essential for the existence of these ecosystems. Keystone companies create value in ecosystems by creating a series of assets that can be further scaled and shared with other ecosystem members. This study focused on studying keystones’ strategic value creation practices in Finnish healthcare technology ecosystems.

This research was conducted as a qualitative single case study, which focused on the Finnish healthcare technology industry. Research data was collected through semi- structured interviews from business executives and leaders from healthcare technology companies that are emerging as ecosystem keystones in the Finnish market. Data analysis was an iterative process, which consisted of transcription, categorization and coding, as well as final synthesis of the data. Furthermore, the research findings were discussed in relation with existing literature to improve the validity of the research.

The findings of this research indicated that knowledge and technology assets are vital for keystones’ value creation process. The most important knowledge assets are: keystone’s ability to act as a middleman in the ecosystem by connecting and match-making different actors, sharing existing industry expertise as well as providing marketing resources for others. These were emphasized to improve innovation, visibility and bring business opportunities to other actors in the ecosystem. The most essential technology assets are: advanced tools and technologies, digital platforms, and data provision. These assets enable other ecosystem members to enhance and make their offerings more attractive. Interestingly, contradicting with the existing literature, financial assets were not seen relevant in the Finnish context.