The world is facing grand societal challenges of different kinds; climate, poverty, overpopulation, diseases and pandemics, conflicts and more. At their core, grand challenges can be defined as specific critical barriers that, if removed, would help solve an important societal problem with a high likelihood of global impact through widespread implementation. Much of the research conducted on grand challenges has focused on how organizations can contribute to solving grand challenges through bold ideas and unconventional, practical approaches. Because we live in a highly interdependent world, solutions often require multiple organizations working at multiple levels of action, sometimes in highly coordinated ways.
Ecosystems are “relatively self-contained, self- adjusting systems of resource-integrating actors connected by shared institutional arrangements and mutual value creation through service exchange." Ecosystems are composed of diverse actors who interact with each other within and across micro, meso, and macro levels that are nested and complementary to each other. Scholars have argued that, to co-create mutual economic and social value through their interactions and to avoid value co-destruction, actors in an ecosystem must coordinate with each other. This is crucial given the complexity and dynamic evolution of ecosystems, as well as the potential number and diversity of actors involved, particularly when working to solve grand challenges. Such coordination is supposedly ensured by the existence of shared institutional arrangements among the actors, namely “sets of interrelated institutions” composed of normative (values, social norms), cultural-cognitive (organizational policies), and regulative (laws) institutions. Those institutions enable, guide, and constrain the actors’ behaviors in their resource- integrating interactions.
Digital technologies play a growing role in resource integration, thus digital readiness may be a key success factor. But while structures are necessary for coordinating ecosystems, they are likely not sufficient. Relationships are a key ingredient of effective coordination when actors are highly interdependent and when they are carrying out work characterized by high levels of uncertainty and time constraints. Relational coordination is the coordination of work through relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect, supported by frequent, timely, accurate, problem solving communication in the context of interdependence, uncertainty and time constraints. While this theory has most often been applied within organizations, it can be expanded to address cross-organizational and cross-sectoral coordination.
Ecosystems may require relational forms of coordination to ensure successful outcomes and to manage conflicting priorities among actors; if so, institutions and digital technologies need to be designed to support relational coordination at and across levels.
Coordinating Ecosystems at Multiple Levels
Meta level |
Institutional coordination |
Macro level |
Cross-organizational coordination |
Meso level |
Within-organization coordination |
Micro level |
Interpersonal coordination |
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