Quantified Framework to Classify and Prioritize Stakeholders in Emergent Ecosystems

Abstract

The complexity of automation in heavy-duty mobile machines (HDMMs) is transforming traditional and transactional supply relationships into collaborative relationships, thereby leading to an emergence of ecosystems for autonomous HDMMs. However, our previous work highlights stakeholder identification and engagement in the HDMM industry as a predominantly ad hoc and heuristic exercise, wherein organizations lack clarity regarding appropriate business engagement strategies for autonomous HDMMs. Accordingly, we utilize the well-established theoretical stakeholder salience attributes of power, legitimacy, and urgency to propose a practical framework to classify and prioritize stakeholders in the HDMM industry. The proposed framework quantifies the stakeholder salience attributes into measurable parameters thereby enabling organizations to understand how different stakeholders are likely to affect the organization and to assign appropriate engagement strategies. The proposed framework can also be generalized and thereby contributes towards enabling collaborative innovation in other emergent ecosystems too.