Striving for Sustainability Performance Through Digital Platforms and Advanced Collaboration in Digital Transformation

Abstract

Digital platforms, as key drivers of digital transformation, expand opportunities for business development—particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)—by enabling value-creating activities through digital resources. As infrastructures that mediate interactions and tasks, they have become increasingly central to management research, yet their impact on organizational performance remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by investigating how external digital platforms influence collaboration, from bilateral collaboration on supply chain platforms to multidirectional ecosystem collaboration on industrial platforms, and their impact on sustainability performance. Drawing on survey data from Finnish B2B manufacturing and service firms, the findings reveal that while both bilateral and ecosystem collaboration are strengthened by digital platforms, only ecosystem collaboration improves sustainability performance. These results highlight the importance of broad cross-organizational collaboration and suggest that SMEs transition from supply chain-focused to ecosystem-oriented models. This study contributes to the digitalization-sustainability nexus and offers insights for collaborative management in SMEs.