Despite the promise and necessity of sustainable service ecosystems (SSE) to generate transformative value, many SSEs have failed to emerge or have struggled to survive. By investigating the design process of an SSE and the underlying factors that inhibit collaboration between its actors, this study answers calls to use the concept of actor engagement to further understand the dynamics of designing service ecosystems (Vink et al. 2021), as well as calls to further research sustainable services (Huang et al. 2021; Ostrom et al. 2021) and SSEs (Field et al. 2021). 

The main contribution lays in the expansion of the actor engagement concept by identifying five engagement constraints (i.e., institutional, economic, legal, political, and technological) that influence the level of engagement. In line with the systemic view of actor engagement (Brodie et al. 2019), the identified engagement constraints complement current actor engagement conceptualizations by providing systemic factors that influence the engagement behavior of actors. 

Secondly, we leverage service ecosystem design literature, and we identify two non-design related tensions in SSE design (coopetition, and personal commitment), and three design related tensions (related to the value proposition, business model, and governance of the SSE). Indeed, service ecosystem designers may encounter unexpected problems when sustainability becomes a central feature — our findings provide a first overview of tensions that occur in the design process of an SSE and that inhibit them from emerging and realizing sustainable/transformative outcomes.

Thirdly, we find indications that the interplay between engagement and tensions can be perceived as a recursive process, as an actor’s engagement can result in tensions, which in turn can influence their level of engagement. Thus, we provide further insights into the interdependencies and dynamics in SSE design processes (Patrício et al. 2018; Sangiorgi et al. 2017; Vink et al. 2021) and a theoretical understanding for disengagement processes(Chandler and Lusch 2015; Lehtinen et al. 2019)