Building the Value Proposition of a Digital Innovation Hub Network to Support Ecosystem Sustainability

Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) play a key role in bolstering European companies to overwhelm innovation barriers and drive Europe as the world's primary leader in the Industry 4.0 digital revolution; they are one-stop-shop ecosystems able to provide four main functionalities (test before investing, support to find investments, innovation ecosystems, and networking, skills and training). Even if a surge in their diffusion has been registered, their sustainability is still far from being well defined in a structured way. Several approaches and methods are available from literature to ground the sustainability plan of companies' business. Among them, the first activity to be addressed is the value proposition (VP) analysis, and the most diffused approach is the Value Proposition Canvas (VPC); this paper proposes the application of the VPC (jointly used with other methods from the VP literature) to build the VP of the HUBCAP network (supporting European small and medium-sized enterprises in the adoption of model-based design methods and tools to support cyber-physical system technologies) per each of its four main customer segments (DIHs, academic partners and research and technology organizations, technology/tool providers and technology/tool users). Results highlight the need to characterize the analysis per each of these customers, open up new opportunities to build a structured business model of the network, and constitute a basis for assessing the potential synergies with similar DIH networks. The method proposed can be applied to any other DIH or network of DIH to define their specific VP, ground the strategy to reach their sustainability, and trigger collaborations with each of the four customer segments considered in the analysis.