Beyond organizations: Responsible value creation and participation in common platforms

Abstract

This dissertation explores how responsible management can facilitate participation in common platforms, addressing the organizational and societal challenges of scaling collaborative value creation. Building on a transdisciplinary framework that integrates responsible management, service ecosystem theory, and participation studies, the research investigates how responsibilities can be reconfigured across institutional levels - from individuals and communities to social enterprises, platforms, and ecosystems. Methodologically, the dissertation adopts a constructivist grounded theory approach combined with qualitative case studies, participatory design scenarios, and narrative analyses. Four interlinked articles provide the empirical foundation: (1) the humanistic and systemic challenges of responsible organizational transformation; (2) social enterprises as vehicles of social innovation; (3) participatory design of digital platforms for commons-based value creation; and (4) the role of civil society in institutionalizing responsibility across communities and ecosystems. The findings advance a multi-level model of responsible facilitation in organizational ecosystems. At the micro level, responsible leadership and individual agency are shown to be essential yet constrained by capacity and cultural dynamics. At the meso level, community meaning-making and platform design enable value co-creation and resource pooling across organizational boundaries. At the macro level, participatory governance and commons-based institutional designs create conditions for scaling social innovation. Collectively, these insights culminate in a three-layer social and digital architecture: (1) individual capacity-building tools, (2) community decision-making interfaces, and (3) ecosystem-level impact accounting systems, maintained through open standards for interoperability. The dissertation contributes to theory by reframing responsibility as a situated, relational logic that bridges institutional divides, and to practice by offering design principles for platforms that enable scalable, trust-based participation in addressing grand societal challenges.