Ecosystem Orchestration within Digital Servitization : A Path towards Sustainable Industry

The development of new digital technologies is enabling manufacturing firms to transition from their traditional product-centric approaches to a more sophisticated service-oriented model, known as “digital servitization”. Moreover, this convergence between digitalization and servitization can provide innovative ways of reducing environmental footprints and enhancing social impact, while preserving firms' economic viability. Digital servitization can, therefore, be considered one of the pathways to bringing sustainable benefits to the manufacturing industry. Nevertheless, digital servitization is a challenging endeavor because it involves the transformation of digital infrastructures, the implementation of formal governance principles, and the close interactions between firms. Since only a few individual firms can claim to have all the technological resources and capabilities necessary to create and deliver digital services and solutions, multiple actors are required to work together in so-called innovation ecosystems to reap the benefits of digital servitization. This highlights the importance of transforming ecosystems and establishing cooperative collaboration between diverse actors to facilitate the formation, orchestration, and expansion of ecosystems over time. Similarly, ecosystem orchestration and managing complex collaborations to realize the ecosystem vision have been proven to be the most challenging aspects of this transformation within the context of digital servitization. Despite the growing interest in ecosystem orchestration in research and practice, there is still a lack of knowledge about how this process can be conducted within the context of digital servitization. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to advance understanding of how ecosystems can be orchestrated within digital servitization to realize a more sustainable industry. Featuring a cover story and four separate but interrelated papers, this thesis uses a variety of different methodological approaches to advance understanding and knowledge of ecosystem orchestration for the co-creation of digitally enabled advanced services and solutions. As a result of conducting a systematic literature review, Paper 1 provides the foundation for the remaining studies. Following this, Papers 2 and 3 adopt a qualitative case study approach to contribute to the empirical aspect of the thesis. Furthermore, Paper 4 adopts a mixed-method approach (fsQCA) to fill the gap of scarce quantitative and hybrid methods in the digital servitization literature. As a contribution to the emerging literature on digital servitization, this thesis proposes a framework for how firms can orchestrate their ecosystems in digital servitization in order to achieve sustainable industry benefits. The framework outlines three major building blocks of activities that industrial firms perform in order to orchestrate their ecosystem in digital servitization. These blocks of activities are undertaken to support: 1) digital value architecture, 2) the contractual governance mechanism, and 3) relational ecosystem governance. Moreover, it extends the discussion on how these building blocks interact and co-evolve for ecosystem orchestration to occur in the digital servitization context in order to achieve sustainable industry outcomes