Infrastructure ecosystem leadership: the process of acting as infrastructure owner organisation

Owner organisations have a special role in ensuring the functioning of physical infrastructure and the built environment that is critical in supporting the smooth functioning of society. However infrastructure development is often challenged by delay, cost increase and quality issues as well as placing a great strain on the natural environment through the extraction of natural resources and creation of waste and pollution (Brunet, 2025; Whyte & Mottee, 2022). As opposed to a temporary project owner, the designation of a “strong” (Morris & Hough, 1987) or “enduring” (Denicol et al., 2021: 341) owner organisation includes the intention to develop internal project delivery capabilities in the organisation with a long-term approach to multiple future projects.

While considerable research exists on owner organisations, including project capabilities (Davies & Brady, 2000; DeFillippi & Arthur, 1998) and owner capabilities (Leiringer & Zhang, 2021; MaytorenaSanchez & Winch, 2022; Winch & Leiringer, 2016), this research project discovered that these capabilities are difficult to implement in practice and therefore a need to understand in detail the actuality of acting as an owner organisation. The physical scale and long time horizons in the infrastructure industry inspired the use of the perspective of organisational ecosystems, therefore this thesis explores the theoretical perspective of owner organisation acting as a “core firm” in a construction ecosystem (Schmidt & Foss, 2023: 1).

The research was conducted through an in-depth longitudinal case study of a government agency responsible for ownership of the national railway infrastructure. The research takes a mixed methods approach (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2003) consisting of observation of project and programme steering committee meetings, interviews with employees of the organisation, analysis of project documents, and analysis of secondary material that is publicly available online or through the internal intranet.

Each of the papers in the Appendix takes a different perspective through smaller case studies embedded within this organisation (Yin, 2017), and each paper comes with a different facet of the process of acting as owner organisation. Although the owner organisation exerts considerable influence on the ecosystem, the papers demonstrate the limitations of this influence and the interrelationship of the ecosystem lead and the participants. The papers describe the mechanisms that influence the ecosystem (Paper B) and different processes of capability development, including commercial strategy (Paper C), distributed leadership (Paper D), interventions in complex systems (Paper E), and project shaping (Paper F). While there are clear limitations that the data is taken from a single case study, the mechanisms and sequences of events may be recognisable and generalisable in other contexts.

By synthesizing these results, this thesis presents the role of owner organisation as a continual process of creating the structure of the ecosystem, observing the behaviour of the ecosystem, and in modifying the structure accordingly. Ownership of physically massive, complex infrastructure assets presents particularly challenges not often addressed in organisational ecosystem literature; therefore this thesis presents the process of acting as infrastructure owner organisation as infrastructure ecosystem leadership. The thesis concludes with an ecological analogy employing the concepts of succession, coevolution, and adaptation to describe the process of acting as owner organisation in a construction ecosystem.