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Despite good project front-end planning, projects typically need continuous coordination among the participants concerning scope of work, pace, and timing during the execution phase to be accomplished without delays. Coordination can be formal or informal. Research shows that informal coordination of residual and unforeseen interdependencies enhances time saving and facilitates better understandings. Still though, many sub-contractors choose not to coordinate informally. The purpose of this paper is to identify drivers that enhance or inhibit informal coordination among sub-contractors during project execution.

A qualitative, explorative case study approach was applied, involving 15 SME sub-contractors within the offshore wind power energy sector.

Six drivers which enhance informal coordination and three drivers which inhibit informal coordination among sub-contractors in projects were identified.

The findings imply that management in project-oriented organizations can enhance informal coordination across project sub-contractors in the project execution phase by facilitating trust building; by emphasizing previous collaboration successes with the sub-contractors and the possibility of future common projects; by being explicit about expectations on informal coordination; and by developing sub-contractor contracts that are not very tight in economic terms, but instead give some leeway in relation to coordination.

The paper contributes to a gap on coordination within projects and in the specificity of the context of offshore wind energy in which the concept of informal coordination across sub-contractors is explored.

As coopetition often characterizes relationships in ecosystems, social factors are particularly important to ensure resilient and reliable relationships, therefore efficient collaboration, and a corresponding outcome. Social factors have so far only been considered as peripheral factors in the ecosystem literature. Thus, this study aims to analyse the current state of literature to provide initial insights into the impact of social factors on value co-creation in supply chain ecosystems.

A structured literature review was conducted. Eleven articles were identified which explicitly examined social factors in the context of supply chain ecosystems.

The findings showed that in current research contributions, especially three social factors are considered crucial for value co-creation within supply chain ecosystems: trust, commitment and mindset. Moreover, researchers focus so far only on positive-affected social factors.

The findings enable ecosystem orchestrators as well as actors to strengthen social factors in supply chain ecosystems. The cultivation and proactive consideration of social factors is crucial for efficient and effective collaboration and has a corollary effect on supply chain ecosystems value co-creation.

This paper extends the limited literature on social factors within supply chain ecosystems, notably from a strategic management perspective. The findings help scholars to understand why social factors do play a crucial role regarding the value co-creation in supply chain ecosystem and how specific social factors influence the overall business outcome. By raising awareness of the importance of social factors for all ecosystem actors, complementary cooperation in the ecosystem improves, which in turn has a positive impact on value co-creation.