This thesis enhances our ability to harness the “power of we” in solving systemic problems of significant societal and economic importance. It argues that the strategic paradigm is shifting from organization-centric to collaboration-centric, while collaboration often involves multiple diverse organizations. Framing business as ‘peace’ instead of ‘war’ suggests that the ability to structure and manage such inter-organizational multi-party collaboration is a dynamic capability. This capability can help companies of different sizes and public organizations work together in addressing systemic problems.

The research problem of this thesis – “How to structure and manage inter-organizational multi-party collaboration when solving systemic problems?” – presents a contemporary research setting for strategic management scholars, organizational scientists as well as innovation and ecosystem scholars alike, while calling for a cross-disciplinary approach. This thesis starts from the strategic foundation, proceeds through understanding structures and most importantly develops frameworks that help manage inter-organizational multi-party collaboration. Qualitative methodologies namely engaged scholarship and longitudinal case study, are applied, and the two in-depth case studies, EnergySampo with focus on green transition in the energy industry and LUXTURRIM5G with focus on intelligent urban environments. They provide invaluable insights on how inter-organizational multi-party collaboration unfolds in real life.

The frameworks developed in this thesis provide novel views into theorizing in strategic management, organizational science, innovation and ecosystems. First, the concept of strategic purpose and the process of collaborative strategizing contribute to theories of strategic management. Second, from innovation and ecosystem perspectives, the framework for positioning different forms of inter-organizational multi-party collaboration helps enhance the conceptual clarity related to clusters, ecosystems, networks and platforms, and support development of the plausible decision-making process underpinning these structural choices. Third, the most significant contribution of this thesis, the dynamic collaboration capability framework, in turn, helps in understanding the importance of strategic purpose in creating trust and ensuring value creation and value capture.

From a practical standpoint, these contributions offer leaders of public organizations and companies of different sizes new tools that can help identify new opportunities through collaborative strategizing. Together with the frameworks enhancing conceptual clarity related to different structures of inter-organizational multi-party collaboration, they help manage such collaboration, and to ensure transition from value creation to value capture. Above all, the contributions of this research can help manage the expectations of different organizations, structure inter-organizational multi-party collaboration to meet those expectations, and better manage portfolios of such collaboration, ensuring efficient use of resources and development of the dynamic capabilities needed in today’s business environment by harnessing the “power of we”.