Orchestrating ICT ecosystem for sustainability transition: strategies, models and empirical evidence from the Finnish ICT sector

Abstract

Information and communication technology (ICT) has become deeply embedded in our everyday lives, bringing tremendous wealth and prosperity. Sadly, ICT business activities have also resulted in unintended sustainability challenges, including carbon emissions, energy consumption, natural resource depletion, and massive electronic waste. These sustainability challenges are wicked problems, meaning they are complex and systemic, difficult to trace the problem to a single source, and involve multiple interdependent stakeholders. Although many of these sustainability challenges have been discussed for decades among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers, our collective response as ICT ecosystem stakeholders has been inadequate. This dissertation aims to provide Finnish ICT organisations with a framework for advancing the sustainability transition through collective action from ICT ecosystem stakeholders. Based on a qualitative methodology and a multi-stakeholder ecosystem (MSE) approach, the study articulates strategies and approaches to orchestrate ICT ecosystem stakeholders toward supporting systemic change for sustainability. The dissertation reveals four distinct approaches for engaging ICT ecosystem stakeholders to address sustainability challenges: top-down, bottom-up, formal, and informal, all of which are imperative to advancing the sustainability transition in the ICT sector. Theoretically, the dissertation contributes to the literature on ecosystem orchestration, sustainability, and stakeholder engagement by developing an integrated theoretical framework for ecosystem orchestration to achieve sustainability outcomes. For practitioners, the study proposes artifacts to help organizations translate their sustainability visions into concrete actions. The study underscores the importance of collective action among ICT producers, organizations, policymakers, and end-users to advance the sustainability transition in the digital revolution.