Commercializing Autonomous Solutions: An empirical investigation of managerial challenges and actions

Abstract

Autonomous solutions, such as self-driving vehicles and unmanned vessels, have long been forecast to have a radical impact across industrial domains, promising to slice driver costs and increase productivity, improve safety, and reduce environmental footprint once they are in operation. Yet while recent technological advancements have brought the first generation of autonomous solutions into existence, their wide-spread adoption is still pending. Aside from the technological challenge in developing the required capabilities to sense the surroundings and make real-time driving decisions, providers face severe market barriers on multiple stakeholder levels. Important stakeholders often assess the impact of autonomous solutions based on how their traditional counterparts are used. Customers are, for example, reluctant to invest in autonomous solutions because they fail to see any value potential beyond driver cost savings. Yet this too is jeopardized by traditional regulatory frameworks that are based on human presence. To further complicate the matter, end users and employees often perceive these solutions as threats to their safety and job security. Moreover, incumbent ecosystems are geared toward traditional solutions – a practicality that further raises the bar for providers seeking to develop, deliver, and operate autonomous solutions at market scale. Yet, despite such huge commercial barriers, the scholarly literature on autonomous solutions has tended to come from technological domains. And while research on the managerial aspects required to make autonomous solutions a commercial success is dawning, studies remain scarce in number, scattered across literature streams, and on a conceptual level that lacks consideration of the provider perspective. Thus, there is a need for empirical research to dissect how market barriers translate into commercialization challenges for the providers facing them, and to understand how these providers manage the process of overcoming them. The overarching aim of this thesis is, therefore, to advance understanding of how the commercialization process of autonomous solutions providers unfolds. This thesis adopts an emerging view from radical innovation that regards commercialization as a process encompassing business model design and market creation activities. It operates in parallel with technology development and is not merely a dissemination step. Employing an exploratory qualitative research approach, this thesis builds on case studies of autonomous solutions providers and bridges industrial application contexts. Moreover, the data sets include interviews of an extended range of stakeholders and are analyzed using thematic analysis. This thesis comprises three individual research papers and a cover document (kappa). The ‘kappa’ neatly integrates findings from the three research papers into a cohesive unit and maps it into a larger discussion on the commercialization of autonomous solutions. Overarchingly, this thesis contributes to the literature by initiating a scholarly discussion that places commercialization in the forefront of autonomous solutions research. It is the first cohesive body of research to empirically examine the process of commercializing autonomous solutions. Specifically, this thesis contributes by providing in-depth descriptions of the complex and intertwined challenges that autonomous solutions providers face in commercializing autonomous solutions. In addition to highlighting the challenges residing on the demand side, this thesis explores the major challenges that providers face in developing the supply side for the commercialization of autonomous solutions. For instance, the findings shows that providers face three entangled challenges – ensuring ecosystem growth, securing their commercial position, and switching from traditional product logics to servitized business models. Moreover, this thesis contributes knowledge on how autonomous solutions providers manage the commercialization process. By linking challenges with the sequencing of managerial actions in a comprehensive framework, this thesis explains how the commercialization process of autonomous solutions providers unfolds. Specifically, the thesis shows that providers leverage commercial pilots to influence an increasing range of stakeholders, such as customers, ecosystem actors, and institutional actors to tackle challenges on the supply and demand side. On a more detailed level, the thesis links managerial actions to underlying commercialization challenges at each step. For example, to balance the threefold problem, providers develop a service actor under their control. In this way, they attain the required ecosystem growth and build a key commercial stake, without having to transform their own organization. Another key contribution is that it explains how providers develop a new value logic for autonomous solutions to unleash the commercial potential. In addition, the thesis carries considerable managerial implications that serve to guide managers in their efforts to successfully commercialize autonomous solutions. Finally, the thesis holds important policy implications and suggestions for the actors promoting and supporting radical innovations. For example, it contends that innovation policy must change from viewing commercialization as a final dissemination step, to instead recognizing the need to support commercialization activities in the early innovation phases to reduce the risk of failure.