Orchestrating a digital platform ecosystem to address societal challenges: a robust action perspective

Orchestration of digital platform ecosystems has been well examined in the context of markets and the private sector where an orchestrator is a resourceful firm exploiting commercial opportunities in an industry. However, little is known about how it occurs when a government organization orchestrates to address societal challenges. We build upon the construct of ‘robust action’—identified with chess masters who play to advance a broad strategy while simultaneously maintaining flexibility—to explain how orchestration by a government organization might overcome initiation, stabilization, expansion, and meta-governance challenges through digital platform enabled participative architecture, multivocal inscriptions, and distributed experimentation. Evidence for our theoretical framework is drawn from empirical studies of the Aadhaar, a platform ecosystem orchestrated to address multiple societal challenges stemming from identity and its management