Orchestration is an emergent concept, understood as a style of inter-firm coordination via indirect governance, which has gained attention due to its relevance for joint value creation and delivery across a diverse set of actors and stakeholders. The purpose of this conference paper is to present the progress of our review thus far and receive feedback for the development and understanding of this important concept. Overall, the aim of the review is to consolidate and clarify understanding on inter-organizational orchestration to direct future studies on this topic.

To achieve this, we have followed appropriate guidelines for collecting relevant papers systematically and are currently at the stage of finalising our sample before conducting abductive qualitative analyses. Preliminary findings suggests that orchestration has previously been examined from an intra-organizational perspective, focused on the resource-based view and capabilities-based view, where this review calls for a higher level of analysis at the inter-organizational perspective. We provide definitions of the concept and discuss initial emergent themes including: antecedents, roles & types, capabilities, mechanisms, and benefits & outcomes. Particularly for platform and ecosystem scholars this review provides comprehension and clarity on orchestration from an inter-organizational perspective, in order to guide future research. While practitioners, notably orchestrators (i.e. hub-firms), can learn from these studies best practices relevant for future management.

Authors: Jessica Fishburn, Christina Häfliger, Paavo Ritala, Henri Hakala, Argyro Almpanopoulou

Abstract presented during the R&D Management Conference “Innovation for People and Territories”, in Trento, Italy, 9-13 July 2022.