Collective adoption challenges in maritime digital platforms: a multi-stakeholder perspective

Digital platforms are widely promoted for improving coordination, visibility, and data exchange in maritime logistics. Yet many platform initiatives struggle to achieve sustained and widespread engagement in practice. This study explains why digital platforms struggle to achieve collective adoption among multiple stakeholders involved in maritime logistics, including different tiers of freight forwarders, shippers, and manufacturers. Using a qualitative research design, this study identifies a cascade of misfits between platform design assumptions and the institutional and operational structures of the industry. These misfits propagate at the platform design, collective adoption, and organizational implementation levels, ultimately leading to fragmented and selective platform use. The findings reveal that adoption is constrained not simply by technological limitations but by systemic misalignments across actors, roles, workflows, and governance arrangements. This study contributes to the logistics and supply chain literature by explaining why digital platforms fail to scale in asset-intensive environments and by identifying the conditions, such as shared standards, interoperability, and cross-actor alignment, that are needed to enable meaningful digital transformation in maritime logistics.