Abstract
Smart manufacturing requires increasingly digitized production settings in order to achieve full flexibility of production environments to fulfil vastly individualized customer requests. Although future value-creation architectures will increasingly be designed and implemented through standardized technological platforms, the operating strategies for the necessary platforms and multi-industry business ecosystems are not yet well understood. This paper aims to mitigate these limitations by presenting the emerging research stream on platforms and business ecosystems. It illuminates the novelty and the usefulness of ecosystem-based approaches for production and operations management, to instigate a cumulative, interdisciplinary body of knowledge.