Orchestrating Sustainable Service Ecosystems

Achieving and maintaining sustainability in complex service ecosystems is a pressing challenge for service firms. Yet, many sustainability efforts, like compliance-driven measures, remain incremental and fall short in the face of accelerating global crises. To create meaningful impact, service firms are called upon to act as change agents within their ecosystems and have been given a mandate to drive systemic sustainability transformation. However, many struggle to operationalize such a shift. We argue this is due largely to a lack of conceptual clarity of what sustainability in service looks like, how service firms can advance sustainability objectives, as well as how service firms should enable ecosystem-wide transformation. To address these questions, we conduct an integrative review of 467 empirical and conceptual studies published between 2018 and 2024 that explore sustainability in service. We introduce the concept of sustainable service ecosystem orchestration and provide a novel typology of four sustainable service orchestration ideal types. In doing so, we position sustainable service orchestration as a foundational concept to advance theoretical understanding of sustainable service ecosystems, guide future research, and offer practical pathways for service firms through a managerial roadmap of sustainable service ecosystem orchestration.