Top-down or bottom-up strategy? Advancing the understanding of ecosystem orchestration approaches for sustainability: a systematic review

Abstract

As organizations increasingly collaborate with a complex web of stakeholders to co-create and capture value in the digital economy, advancing sustainability requires urgent and collective action across diverse stakeholders. Building on the critical role of stakeholder engagement and ecosystems in advancing sustainability transition, this study addresses the limited consensus on how ecosystem stakeholders can be effectively orchestrated to address sustainability challenges. Prior work falls short of comprehensive ecosystem orchestration strategies for multi-stakeholder collaborations towards sustainability. Drawing on a systematic literature review of 52 studies from four databases (Scopus, IEEE, ScienceDirect and WoS) published from 2002–2023, this study aims to address an existing research gap by synthesizing the ecosystem orchestration literature into an actionable framework for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. The study proposes a multi-level ecosystem orchestration framework and categorizes 12 ecosystem strategies into top-down (alignment, value realization, nourishment, revitalization), bottom-up (empowerment, coopetition, engagement, legitimacy), and middle-out approaches (adaptive, evolution, reaction, sensing). The framework highlights how ecosystem leaders can deploy various strategies to coordinate and engage multiple stakeholders, extending business relationships beyond short-term economic outcomes to a long-term sustainability agenda. By integrating and synthesizing extensive literature on ICT and sustainability, ecosystem orchestration and stakeholder engagement strategies, the study advances theoretical understanding on multi-stakeholder engagement for collective action towards sustainability.