Significant advancements within the fields of digitalization, electrification, and automation have enabled the development, testing, and implementation of increasingly advanced autonomous solutions. Current examples of industrial automation promise significant economic and sustainability-oriented benefits for industrial customers. Yet, implemented autonomous solutions have rarely advanced beyond ‘islands of autonomy’. Although enabling initial improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of operations, they have not led to the systemic process improvements that fully integrated site-wide solutions can achieve. It is becoming increasingly clear that the major challenges in this shift extend beyond technology to focus on business transformation and ecosystem relationships. Yet, extant research offers few insights into these domains. There is a need to develop a business-focused maturity framework for autonomous solutions to contribute to a predominantly technical discourse and support equipment actors and their wider ecosystems in commercializing autonomous solutions. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how industrial equipment manufacturers can align the development of technology, business models and ecosystem relationships for the advancement of autonomous solutions. We build on case studies that include 32 interviews from four industrial equipment manufacturers and their extended ecosystems of customers and partners. We capture our findings in a three-level maturity framework for industrial autonomous solutions. This framework unwraps the attributes of each level from the perspectives of technical system development, ecosystem configuration, and business model design and is complemented by three overarching principles for the successful commercialization of autonomous solutions.

在数字化，电气化和自动化领域中的重大进步使开发，测试和实施日益先进的自治解决方案成为可能。当前工业自动化的例子有望为工业客户带来可观的经济和可持续发展利益。然而，已实施的自治解决方案很少超越“自治岛”。尽管可以初步提高运营效率和有效性，但它们并没有带来完全集成的站点范围解决方案可以实现的系统过程改进。越来越明显的是，这一转变中的主要挑战不仅限于技术，还着眼于业务转型和生态系统关系。但是，现有研究对这些领域的见解很少。有必要为自主解决方案开发以业务为中心的成熟度框架，以在自主解决方案的商业化过程中为主要的技术论述和支持设备参与者及其更广泛的生态系统做出贡献。因此，本文的目的是调查工业设备制造商如何调整技术，业务模型和生态系统关系的发展以促进自主解决方案的发展。我们基于案例研究，其中包括来自四家工业设备制造商及其扩展的客户和合作伙伴生态系统的32次采访。我们在针对工业自治解决方案的三级成熟度框架中捕获了我们的发现。此框架从技术系统开发，生态系统配置和业务模型设计的角度解开了每个级别的属性，并通过三个总体原则进行了补充，以使自主解决方案成功实现商业化。