The Critical Factors in Encouraging Alarm and Security Companies to Join a Collective Action in the Big Data Field: a multiple-case study

Abstract

Working together with your competitors or, more generally, with other relevant players is becoming one the main pathways to follow in order to achieve great results and accomplish your goals. Indeed, cooperation and collaboration are spreading through new and various forms of partnerships and common projects (Hecht, 2013). However, this trend raises remarkable advantageous as well as challenges and obstacles to be faced when trying to pursue a successful collaboration. Within this context, the Swedish Fire Protection Agency (SBF) is trying to develop the so-called Sandbox Model, described as a Big Data recipient shared by different companies and stakeholders, where each one contributes with its own data. Through the cross-analysis of the huge among of data, companies would obtain significant gains and benefits. The social purpose of SBF, nonetheless, is to tackle a social issue, namely the reduction of damages carried by fires and people killed in those occurrences. In order to initiate the Sandbox Model, companies from pre-defined industries shall be convinced to embrace the project. The aim of this work, subsequently, is to identify the factors which may work as incentives and their role in encouraging companies from the Alarm and Security Industry to join this project. In so doing, a qualitative approach based on a multiple-case study allowed us to delve into this issue and let these factors arise, providing recommendations for a smooth implementation of the Sandbox Model. Summarizing the findings, trust-related factors as well as organizational and structural features of the common organization play a remarkable role. These factors lay the foundation from which to identify incentives and dictate actions to entice companies from the Alarm and Security industry to join the Sandbox Model, followingly attaining a successful collective action.