Ecosystem orchestration How to thrive in the increasingly networked digital economy

Abstract

Ecosystems, a concept used to describe external inter-organizational networks of actors, is a concept closely linked to the digital economy. When firms become increasingly networked, organizational boundaries blur, which challenges incumbent firms’ notions of being isolated entities. Understanding how to cope with this shift has turned out to be a great challenge. To shed light over these challenges, this research paper develops a framework for ecosystem orchestration, that is managing these inter-organizational network relations, for the digital economy which is the main contribution of this thesis. While previous studies generally take on a platform-centric approach, I have conducted an in-depth qualitative case study of an incumbent firm in the Swedish forest industry to attain in-depth understanding of ecosystem orchestration, complementing existing research with an ecosystem-centric approach. By combining the literature on ecosystems and platforms with the near-lying literature on innovation networks, this research additionally contributes to a unified understanding of these literature streams. This thesis concludes how ecosystem orchestration in the digital economy consists of both non-digital and digital orchestration processes which need to be dually managed by incumbent firms as digitalization sweeps across the ecosystem. In this thesis, I argue that incumbent firms need to integrate ecosystem design processes with digital ecosystem orchestration in leveraging the potential of the digital economy. Additionally, digital orchestration processes are argued to be superior to non-digital as they are scalable to a much greater extent, where non-digital orchestration processes are limited by the number of employees. The findings of this thesis thus additionally reveal the competing concern that unfolds when existing practices of ecosystem orchestration are challenged with digital orchestration processes, constituting a challenge for incumbent firms as existing roles are changing. From a greater perspective, this research contributes to our understanding of how markets as well as labour markets are transformed by digitalization, through providing one piece of puzzle to our understanding of ecosystems.