From Technology Monopoly to Industrial Sharing: How Leading Manufacturers Realize Sustainable Value Circulation

Digital and intelligent transformation reshapes manufacturing ecosystems, and the synergy between technological innovation and sustainable business upgrading drives high-quality industrial development. Based on knowledge interaction theory, this paper adopts a longitudinal single-case design and the Gioia analytical framework to study BYD covering the period 2003–2025. With data triangulation realized through internal corporate archives, public industrial materials and five semi-structured interviews, this paper explores the staged evolution and value allocation mechanism of sustainable business model innovation driven by firms’ proprietary core technologies. Three sequential phases of technological value circulation are summarized: value creation enabled by single-point core technologies, value addition realized through generic product technologies, and cross-industry value sharing facilitated by industrial technology openness. The traction, utilization and recombination of knowledge generate synergistic advantages of core technologies across the innovation chain, industrial chain and value chain, reconstructing a new value operation logic centered on value creation, value addition and cross-boundary value sharing. The extant literature decouples technological evolution and business model innovation, resulting in prominent theoretical gaps. This study improves relevant theoretical explanations and proposes operable industrial strategies, offering references for manufacturing enterprises to achieve long-term sustainable development relying on core technological capabilities.