How Strategic Leaders Drive Firms in Ecosystems: Envisioning Value, Orchestrating Knowledge, and Shifting Roles

Research on business ecosystems has illuminated how ecosystems emerge, evolve, and transform, revealing ecosystem-level dynamics and the central actors that orchestrate them. Yet, it is individual firms that continuously attempt to establish and shift the roles they play within ecosystems through the vision and choices of their strategic leaders. How do strategic leaders drive these shifts? Through a longitudinal case study of Dallara Automobili (1972-2025), we trace how the CEO's prior professional experience shaped an evolving theory of value - a set of conjectures about how value should be created that guided the development of organizational routines enabling progressively more expansive knowledge orchestration. This process shifted Dallara from a peripheral component supplier to a boundary-spanning knowledge orchestrator. Our recursive process model theorizes how the leader's conjectures drive firm role shifts within an ecosystem: experience shapes the leader's theory of value, which drives organizational routines and knowledge orchestration; knowledge orchestration, in turn, redefines the firm's ecosystem role. Ecosystem responses then feed back, augmenting prior experience and, in turn, refining the theory of value so that each round operates at a broader scope. We contribute to ecosystem research by identifying knowledge orchestration as the mechanism through which a leader's theory of value translates into shifts in the firm's role and by showing how this process unfolds recursively as ecosystem responses reshape the leader's conjectures.