The Commercialization of Digital Twin by an Extension of a Business Ecosystem

Product and service innovations are the key driver of the competitiveness in the manufacturing industry. For long time, partnerships between manufacturers, suppliers and service providers have been established to improve overall performance of entire supply chain. Most members in such a supply chain try to expand their business by developing platforms and building their ecosystems. This also occurs in the IT-related industries, in particular when services are provided for large companies. In this chapter, the commercialization of the DigiTwin solution is presented as an extension of a well-running ecosystem OpenDESC.com. The background to the emergence of OpenDESC.com, the customer base and the corresponding offering are described. The method how to systematically plan changes, improvements and extensions by enterprise architecture integration is discussed. The extended offering for new customer categories based on the outcome of DigiTwin is classified and described. The method for assessment of this ecosystem is proposed. Finally, conclusions and outlook summarize the insights and give future directions.