ELSHEIKH Ahmed S., DBA

Pr Xavier Lecocq

Digital Transformation Methodologies, Models and/or Frameworks.

The digital platforms business model appeared several years ago as a new business model that helps organizations expand beyond their physical limitations and achieve new levels of success. Later on, digital platforms became a catalyst for strategic success not only on the single organization level but also on the level of a full cooperating digital business ecosystem, in what is called the digital platform-based ecosystems. Currently, giant digital platform enterprises have the highest market value of all companies all over the world, with some of them are orchestrating the value creation, delivery, and capturing across complex ecosystems. However, digital platforms usually have the winner-takes-all syndrome, which means that the competition between market players is usually severe and sometimes bloody. This leads to and shifts the focus towards the strategy that was employed either behind the winner-takes-all success or behind the go-out-of-business failure. This academic and business research project aims to introduce a rupture grounded theory that provides a holistic framework for strategy formulation and implementation. The discovered theory is going to be a general substantive prescriptive theory, which is going to help practitioners and decision-makers navigate a series of strategic choices for designing and operating the digital platforms that orchestrating value dynamics in a completely enabled ecosystem. Hence, with this discovered/generated explicit knowledge theory, the strategy formulation and implementation for designing and operating these digital services platforms are no longer going to be an ad-hoc nor a black box mission that depends on the tacit knowledge in the mind of platform owners or operators. Furthermore, they will be able to link the initial optimistic sky-limited visions and strategic choices to the most daunting down-to-earth implementation action items. To manage the scope of the research, this research is going to be limited to establishing digital services platforms as a new venture, either by a well-established organization or by a well-funded project, which excludes typical entrepreneurship challenges as well as the original digital maturity of the owner/operator organization. In addition, the research is going to be conducted from the demonstrative-inductive approach/constructivism paradigm theoretical perspective, with the classical grounded theory as a holistic research methodology. Mixed methods are going to be used for data collection including case studies along with suitable several data analysis techniques, such as Gioia Method. The research project is going to capitalize on the latest state-of-the-art and leading globally recognized case studies for the digital platform-based ecosystems divided into two substantive areas. The first substantive area that is related to the literature as secondary data contains any case study found in the literature according to the carefully designed screening protocol as well as a set of successfully proved and published empirical case studies that dominated the economic cycle ended with the 2007 American great recession. On the other hand, the second substantive area focuses on the “UBER Technologies Inc.” as a single case design from an empirical point of view. Actually, UBER Technologies Inc. was selected as a single case study design because the UBER digital platform is a platform from the “Services/Transactions” type as well as it orchestrates a digital services platform-based ecosystem whose size is huge in comparison to the original physical organization and it is totally separated from the original physical owning organization. Furthermore, the UBER digital platform has one of the highest market capitalization among many well-known transactions digital services platforms worldwide, which can be considered as a proxy for how successfully UBER has been able to achieve the desired success. With no comparable competitors within the transportation services industry, this market capitalization can also be considered as a proxy for achieving the winner-takes-all syndrome. This means that UBER strategy is one of the best-fit answers for the research question of this DBA thesis and through its strategy, it was able to both survive and thrive in the new generation of the digital platform-based ecosystems economy. Regarding the literature review, there is no conducted extensive literature review upfront, however, and as recommended by the classical grounded theory, the literature review is used to support the emergence of the classical grounded theory around the emerged core category related to the initially determined core concern. In this DBA thesis, the emerged core category is the ability of the digital service platform to achieve the ultimate success key performance indicator (i.e. the network effect), while the initially determined core concern is the ability of the digital service platform to survive and thrive in the new upcoming generation of the digital platform-based ecosystems economy. Of course, through a classical grounded theory about the strategy formulation and implementation that will be discovered in this DBA thesis. The remaining of the DBA thesis is going to give the details for the research objectives and question, the desired theory type for the discovered theory, the research scope and critical business considerations, the expected theoretical and practical contributions as well as the managerial implications. Then, the research epistemology and research paradigm will be determined plus shedding some light on the birth of the research idea. This is going to be followed by a detailed description of the research methodology, methods and techniques, and the research domains/substantive areas as well as a rationalized explanation about the role and contribution of the literature and literature review in the whole research project. Finally, the different stages of the research project will be presented, including the transition from the thin version of the discovered theory to the full version of the discovered theory including two upgrading processes.