This paper investigates how digital connectivity drives new forms of sustained value creation in traditional industries, where many firms still compete and strategize within a traditional industry structure and supply chain logic. We perform a multiple case study with four companies active in the vehicle component industry and implementing digital connectivity in a business-to-business (B2B) setting. Results show that digital connectivity enables greater transparency, trust, and collaboration with customers and creates new forms of value creation through companies’ strategizing actions – aimed at developing highly customized solutions – and critical capabilities – needed to configure a customer-centric value chain, integrate buyer-supplier digital resources, and improve the coherence between data-driven decision-making, lean management, and employees’ skills. We shed light on how manufacturers leveraged digital connectivity to successfully assimilate and scale up their digital-related capabilities across different dimensions, transforming their business models in a sustained way. This should also complement a change in the governance of customer transactions, fostering transparency and trust. Fine-tuning and expanding well-established B2B relationships through digital connectivity become a priority for traditional businesses to change to new and efficiently sustained value co-creation forms that can be complemented to a successful business model innovation or co-creation strictly linked to larger network connections.

本文研究了数字连接如何推动传统行业持续价值创造的新形式，许多企业仍在传统行业结构和供应链逻辑内竞争和制定战略。我们对活跃于汽车零部件行业并在企业对企业 (B2B) 环境中实施数字连接的四家公司进行了多个案例研究。结果表明，数字连接可以提高透明度、信任度以及与客户的协作，并通过公司的战略行动（旨在开发高度定制的解决方案）和关键能力（配置以客户为中心的价值链、集成和整合所需的关键能力）创造新的价值创造形式。买家-供应商数字资源，提高数据驱动决策、精益管理和员工技能之间的一致性。我们阐明了制造商如何利用数字连接成功地吸收和扩展其在不同维度上的数字相关能力，从而持续改变其业务模式。这也应该补充客户交易治理的变化，促进透明度和信任。通过数字连接微调和扩展已建立的 B2B 关系成为传统企业转向新的、高效持续的价值共创形式的首要任务，这种形式可以补充成功的商业模式创新或与更大网络严格相关的共创连接。