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This paper aims to investigate how orchestration mechanisms characterizing meta-organizations can support sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI) leveraged by digital transition.

This study adopted a qualitative approach. The authors collected qualitative data from 41 in-depth interviews with key informants, participatory longitudinal observations and secondary data analysis related to a digital innovation hub (DIH) and its network.

The findings reveal how meta-organizations, such as DIHs, advance SOI – considering the potentialities of digital technologies – through four orchestration mechanisms: collaboration platform setup, SOI resource arrangement, SOI process enablement and SOI scale-up. Each mechanism is founded on recurrent SOI practices identified as aligning, assembling and progressing, and each is characterized by specific activities that depend on meta-organizations’ evolutionary purposes related to the stages of the creation process. The activation of mechanisms concerns a process outlining three sequential evolutionary trajectories: for assessing and regulating interaction, for promoting and coordinating collective action and for creating a collective identity.

This study contributes to meta-organization and orchestration research oriented toward SOI and leveraged by the digital transition, and considers the distinctive orchestration mechanisms and practices required to support SOI leveraged by the digital transition. Differently from previous research on orchestration and meta-organizations, this study considers the time perspective, and thus, the sequentiality of mechanisms (evolutionary trajectories) to achieve the purposes characterizing the stages of meta-organizations’ creation process.

This paper aims to investigate the eHealth ecosystem’s evolution during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and its effects on the progression of care for patients with chronic cardiovascular disease.

To attain the aim of the study, this study chose to adopt a qualitative method that matches the complexity of the issue. The study was conducted in a real context through 44 face-to-face semi-structured interviews of key informants at different levels of the Italian eHealth service ecosystem, via Microsoft Teams. The interviews were carried out from June 2020 to January 2021. In this research, we adopted an abductive approach that enabled a process where the theoretical framework and the data analysis evolved at the same time.

The study results were used to develop a conceptual framework that considers the key factors enabling and constraining the evolutionary process of the eHealth service ecosystem. In particular, the drivers that emerged from the study were actor role empowerment, actor–network engagement and resource reconfiguration while the inhibitors were inter- and intra-actor misalignment, resource myopia and the platformisation gap. The findings also revealed the pivotal role of the meso level in the development of the eHealth service ecosystem, boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

By adopting a service ecosystem perspective, this paper contributes, at both a theoretical and a managerial level, to a better understanding of the dynamics related to the diffusion of eHealth. The study identifies the main issues that researchers, managers and policymakers should address to support the evolution of the eHealth service ecosystem, with particular regard to chronic cardiovascular disease.

COVID-19 has dramatically changed how people live, socialise and think about their future. The disruptive shock that hit societies all over the world had a significantly negative impact on businesses, creating not only economic discontinuity but also uncertainty and disorientation. This special issue on COVID-19 aims to phrase the pandemic crisis and its impact on how to do business.

The authors follow MacInnis’s (2011) suggestion that a conceptual article sees what others have identified in a new or revised way.

The authors develop the crisis management framework. The authors acknowledge that disruptive events may be repeated, and their consequences will have long-term and permanent impacts. These aspects highlight the need for a systemic approach in which the focus is not limited to an analysis of the cause of the crisis and ways of solving it but includes the paths through which the business, economic and social systems evolve because of the crisis.

Managerial policies, business models and practices that have been effective up to now will probably no longer work. Beyond this backdrop, the articles compiled in this special issue aim to help set the agenda for post-COVID business research

The authors identify four primary themes captured by these articles: strategies, capabilities, organisational transformations and value processes. In their entirety, they represent pieces of a conceptual puzzle that do not provide knowledge of “hard facts” but rather a “soft interpretation of how to approach the “new normal”, i.e. a new social and business context.