Towards the Digital Self-Renewal of Retail: The Generic Ecosystem of the Retail Industry

E-commerce, digital platforms, and digital transformation (DT) pose major challenges to offline businesses in the retail industry. To offset the benefits of the data available to online businesses, stores must digitalize their stores and rethink their value proposition to customers. In a digitalized world, this value is no longer provided by single companies—leveraging a set of companies in the retail ecosystem to jointly create value is now necessary. Therefore, this research project provides an overview of the roles and value flows in Germany’s retail industry in the form of an e3-value model that can be used by scholars for future research on the digitalization of the retail industry. For practitioners, it provides guidance for forging new partnerships to co-create value in interconnected, digital ecosystems.