How legacy firms can embrace the digital ecosystem via digital customer orientation

Because of modern digital technologies, business environments are turning into digital ecosystems, wherein a firm’s traditional interdependencies are increasingly influenced by digital connectivity. For legacy firms, or firms yet to incorporate these technologies into their business models, this shift ushers in new opportunities for value creation, albeit through new capabilities. In this article, we focus on how legacy firms can embrace digital ecosystems to create value through a new capability: digital customer orientation. We define digital customer orientation as offering customized and enriched customer experiences made possible by embracing digital ecosystems. We develop a framework for legacy firms to develop capabilities for digital customer orientation in three steps: (1) by distilling key insights on how digital natives such as Amazon, Google and Facebook leverage their digital ecosystems for digital customer orientation; (2) by showing how legacy firms can apply those insights to harness their digital ecosystems and develop their own approaches for digital customer orientation; and (3) by offering a road map and a research agenda for legacy firms to engage in digital customer orientation—both by highlighting the organizational attributes needed, and by framing those attributes within the principles of transformative marketing.