Digital Asset Creation and Orchestration: Empirical Evidence from Industrial Manufacturing

This study advances the digital transformation literature by focusing on a critical challenge for incumbent industrial manufacturers: the need to rearchitect their stand-alone physical products into digital assets that can be orchestrated as part of a digital service stack. Examining a pioneer of the professional coffee machine industry, this study reveals how rearchitecting stand-alone industrial products unfolds through specific design moves stemming from three design principles: unified programmatic interface, standardized machine codebase, and component decoupling and extensibility. The application of these principles results in a design hierarchy inversion, whereby digital resources and the digital architecture assume primacy over the traditional mechanical architecture of the machines. Our investigation of the hierarchical inversion phenomenon contributes to theory on ontological reversal and digital transformation. It demonstrates the central role that digital resources, along with their architecture and integration within digital service stacks, play for legacy industrial manufacturing organizations. By tracing how CoffeeCo rearchitected its machines to be orchestrated as modules of novel digital service stacks, our findings suggest that ontological reversal is not merely a temporal reversal in the manufacturing sequence, but a reconfiguration of design hierarchy in which digital solutions inform physical product architecture.