Enabled by digital technology, innovation ecology can efficiently realize the transfer, interaction, expansion and evolution of knowledge, and form the core competitiveness of the digital age. At present, China has initially explored an innovation ecosystem supported by "new infrastructure" such as 5G, Internet of Things, industrial Internet and artificial intelligence, with industry leading enterprises as the main body and "platform + a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises" as the main structure, which has become a prototype of the integration of China's digital economy and the real economy, and can meet the needs of future scenarios better. The long-term development of the innovation ecosystem led by the industrial Internet platform is the key to the integration of China's digital economy and the real economy.
However, the current academic research on industrial Internet platform dwells on connotation analysis, exploration and application, and business model analysis, and there is a lack of research on industrial Internet clusters and their ecology. In addition, current studies on the value co-creation of innovation ecosystems are mainly conducted from the perspectives of the innovation ecosystem subjects, and the network relationship formed between the subjects and the external innovation environment, but less attention is paid to the co-creation relationship between the platform and manufacturing enterprises, between intelligent devices and humans, and between machines and data to explain the value co-creation process mechanism of the innovation ecosystem led by the industrial Internet platform. The value co-creation mechanism of the innovation ecosystem led by the industrial Internet platform is yet to be revealed.
The innovation ecosystem led by the industrial Internet platform takes digital resources and digital infrastructure as key production factors, reshaping the win-win cooperation logic in the industrial value network, and reflecting unique characteristics different from the general innovation ecosystem. Therefore, drawing on the value co-creation theory of the innovation ecosystem, this study explores three mechanisms, including modularity, scenario, and complementarity from the intrinsic attributes, and analyzes their interactive utility. This paper selects the COSMOPlat Industrial Internet platform as the case study object; it adopts a structured data analysis method to analyze the case, encodes and abstracts the original data, realizes the analysis and induction of the theme, and finally extracts a rigorous theoretical theme, forming a data structure composed of first-order constructs, second-order themes and third-order categories.
It is found that (1) the innovation ecosystem led by the industrial Internet platform is a value creation and value acquisition system composed of multiple participants in different fields. It is an open, supply-and-demand-driven, loosely coupled innovation system based on a multi-platform interactive architecture, and the innovation system can improve the initiative of each subject to participate and the digital ability and innovation diffusion ability through the sharing and symbiosis of technology, resources and scenes, so as to achieve the goal of system innovation. (2) The innovation ecosystem led by the industrial Internet platform achieves a win-win situation of efficiency and collaboration within the ecosystem on the supply side through modularity and complementarity, and integrates the demand side into the ecosystem through the scenario mechanism to form a future-oriented co-creation system. The modularity mechanism effectively integrates information technology infrastructure, big data technology, blockchain technology, and artificial intelligence technology, and builds a multi-platform interactive architecture to promote the integration of data and reality. The scenario-based mechanism accesses the scalable new generation of intelligent technology to construct the user scenario-based experience, and activates multiple subjects to actively embed the ecology through the governance scene to create a win-win situation. The complementary mechanism and modular technology are nested in multiple layers to complete the industry technology complementarity and digital technology complementarity, match scenarios to iterate the solution covering the whole life cycle of users, optimize collaborative innovation among various entities in the ecosystem through the platform enabling process complementarity. (3) The innovation ecosystem led by the industrial Internet platform integrates resources efficiently to achieve value co-creation through the modular mechanism, scenario mechanism, and complementary mechanism, improves the ecological digitization ability, and forms the same side network effect, cross-side network effect and cross-domain network effect of the innovation ecosystem.