Industry‐wide information infrastructures (IIIS) have recently gained increased attention by policy makers, especially in the healthcare sector where it is believed that IIIS can substantially contribute to the taming of exploding healthcare costs and dramatically improve service quality, e.g., by avoiding widespread medication errors. However, the emergence and evolution of IIIS is as yet poorly understood, partly because the information systems (IS) literature traditionally uses much smaller units of analysis such as projects, organizations or small networks of organization. In this paper, we propose a combined company‐level and industry‐level framework to shed light on the process of IIIS emergence. We demonstrate, for the first time, that IIIS emergence is intricately linked to the industry life cycle for the case of fragmented industries. We also explore the relationship between the industry‐level and company‐level life cycles in the process of IIIS emergence, and develop a novel proposition regarding this relationship. Our findings suggest that current policy initiatives to promote the development of IIIS have not adequately taken industry‐level conditions into consideration.