As digital industrialization advances rapidly, enterprises no longer rely solely on internal technology and product innovation to create value. Instead, they collaborate with multiple ecosystem actors to co-create value. For instance, with the rise of Mobile Internet and the Internet of Things, demand for cloud services surges. Tencent leverages its rich user and data resources, collaborating with application developers, third-party platform companies, and leading players in the office business sector to jointly develop a cloud service ecosystem to provide value to customers. Innovation ecosystems provide a dynamic actor-base perspective for studying value creation in the digital context. While existing research on value creation in digital industry innovation ecosystems emphasizes the impact of multi-actor roles, activities, and connections for value creation, further research is needed to deepen the understanding of the dynamic evolution mechanisms of value creation.

Building upon this background, this paper firstly reviews the evolutionary trajectory of value creation theory research. Value creation theory originates from corporate practices that emphasized earlier on technology and product innovation to build competitive advantages, then evolved into actively seeking collaboration with other actors, and eventually into a multi-actor collaborative value creation process in the digital context. Secondly, it provides a comprehensive review of multi-actor innovation behaviors and interactive relationships within digital industry innovation ecosystems, summarizing value creation mechanisms. Finally, it constructs a theoretical framework for value creation in digital industry innovation ecosystems, revealing the evolutionary patterns of value creation along disruptive innovation value, collaborative value, and quality value.

The contributions of this paper are as follows: Firstly, it summarizes the evolution of value creation research. Secondly, it employs a systematic literature review method to organize the literature on value creation in digital industry innovation ecosystems, analyzes the impact of multi-actor innovation behaviors and interactive relationships on value creation, and summarizes mechanisms for value creation in digital industry innovation ecosystems. Thirdly, it categorizes the dynamic evolution process of value creation from disruptive innovation value to collaborative value and quality value creation, according to the stages of emergence, development, and maturity of digital industry innovation ecosystems, and proposes a research framework for value creation in digital industry innovation ecosystems, which can be used to analyze the dynamic evolution process of value creation and guide ecosystem strategies based on innovation behaviors and multi-actor interactive relationships for digital industries at different development stages.