AVEVA and IMD Business School have launched an Industrial Intelligence Report examining how industrial companies are building digital ecosystems and where execution remains constrained.
Launched at AVEVA World 2026 in Milan, the report is based on input from more than 275 senior leaders across 12 industry sectors. It combines quantitative analysis with detailed interviews and case examples, including organisations such as the Port of Rotterdam and Kwinana in Australia.
The research finds a wide gap between strategic ambition and operating practice. Although 74% of leaders said digital ecosystems are a top strategic priority, only 27% reported sharing data substantially or extensively with ecosystem partners, leaving many industrial collaborations short of the information flow needed for co-ordinated decision-making.
Industrial intelligence is defined in the report as the organisational capability that integrates operational technology, information technology, and artificial intelligence to support connected, data-driven decision-making across industrial ecosystems. That definition moves the focus beyond individual plants or enterprise systems, placing greater weight on how trusted data moves between partners, suppliers, infrastructure providers, and customers.
“With this collaboration with IMD, our ambition is not merely to understand the motivations behind the move to digital ecosystems, but to define the frameworks, competencies and leadership practices that will concretely enable companies to transcend silos and build more adaptive, ecosystem-driven operating models,” said Caspar Herzberg, CEO of AVEVA.
Integration complexity, legacy systems, weak governance, and unclear roles are identified as recurring barriers. These long-standing industrial constraints have become more acute as AI-enabled operations, supply resilience, and decarbonisation programmes demand more consistent, permissioned, and trusted data exchange between organisations.
Governance emerges from the report as a more immediate priority than algorithmic sophistication. Advanced analytics can only operate effectively where companies have resolved practical questions of data ownership, interoperability, permissioning, accountability, and decision rights across organisations with different commercial incentives.
“Governance, integration and learning matter more right now than algorithms,” said Michael Wade, Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital and AI Transformation and Professor of Strategy and Digital at IMD. “Ecosystems are already delivering operational value. The next phase is about converting that foundation into strategic advantage through better data sharing, coordination, clearer roles and more deliberate leadership.”
The launch follows a wider research collaboration between AVEVA and IMD focused on industrial intelligence and connected business ecosystems. AVEVA has also continued to position its CONNECT platform around industrial data sharing, AI-enabled operations, and collaboration across engineering and operational environments.
The full executive summary is available through the Industrial Intelligence Report page.
