Motives, uncertainties, and imbalances in the evolution of a sustainable business ecosystem

Abstract

To address the grand challenges of sustainability, new organisational collaborative forms are required to blend industrial boundaries and approach global sustainability challenges from a broad multistakeholder perspective. Business ecosystems arrive as a collaborative setting, where interdependent actors co-evolve and co-create value in a complementing manner, effectively addressing global sustainability challenges. In this doctoral dissertation, the focus of the investigation is on the business ecosystem concept. Prior studies have addressed the patterns and challenges of ecosystem evolution. However, aspects associated with the actors’ relationships within an ecosystem in the sustainability context and their motivation remain a research gap. Thus, this dissertation aims to investigate motives, uncertainties, imbalances, and alignment mechanisms in the evolution of a sustainable business ecosystem.

This study employs an abductive research strategy with a qualitative research design. Anchored to transaction cost economics, balance theory and power relations, the empirical part of this dissertation is based on four case studies in various industrial contexts with a vision towards sustainable development. Supported by a literature review, the results of the empirical studies address the motives, uncertainties and imbalances over business ecosystems’ evolution in the sustainability context.

This dissertation contributes to the understanding of the business ecosystem by positioning it in comparison to supply chains and networks. The results conclude on the advantages of business ecosystems when addressing sustainability challenges in terms of the synergetic effect of the actions of actors within the ecosystem and their incentives to co-create value in the context of a sustainability-oriented vision, which serves as a motivation to join a collaborative setting in business ecosystems. The findings of this dissertation provide the uncertainties that actors face. Especially, the emerging phase of an ecosystem evolution is recognised as highly uncertain. It also provides implications for ecosystem orchestrators and potential ecosystem actors in terms of interorganizational imbalances to anticipate over ecosystems’ evolution and alignment mechanisms that can be employed for a balanced ecosystem development and successful realisation of the ecosystem’s goal and vision.