Industrial providers engaged in digital servitization increasingly face the challenge of leveraging advanced digital technologies while supporting customers in improving their environmental and social sustainability performance. Meeting these objectives requires industrial providers not only to digitalize their own offerings but also to enable sustainability improvements within customer operations. Against this backdrop, many industrial providers are shifting from traditional product-centric models towards digitally enabled solutions that combine operational performance with sustainability outcomes. However, realizing this potential remains difficult. Digital solutions must be integrated with existing equipment, infrastructures, and data environments, while their use may require corresponding changes in organizational routines, skills, responsibilities, and decision-making practices. These interconnected technical and social challenges extend to providers, customers, and ecosystem partners and become more complex as digital solutions are extended across heterogeneous industrial environments. Consequently, supporting industrial sustainability through digital servitization constitutes a socio-technical alignment problem.

Accordingly, this thesis investigates how industrial providers engaged in digital servitization align socio-technical systems – internally, with customers, and across ecosystem partners – to support industrial sustainability. It adopts a socio-technical systems perspective and views digital servitization as a socio-technical alignment process in which technologies evolve in alignment with organizational routines, decision-making practices, and inter-organizational relationships. The thesis is based on four interrelated qualitative studies that draw on semi-structured interviews, publicly available podcast interviews, and complementary materials.

Paper 1 examines the interacting economic, technological, market, and sustainability-related conditions that drive industrial providers’ engagement in digital servitization. Paper 2 examines how industrial providers support customers in aligning digital solutions with customer infrastructures, organizational routines, and operational practices to support industrial sustainability. Paper 3 analyzes how differences in power dynamics and sustainability focus among industrial actors shape ecosystem configurations and the conditions under which sustainability-oriented change unfolds. Paper 4 investigates how industrial providers coordinate intra-organizational, customer, and ecosystem practices to scale digital solutions beyond localized implementations.

Through an integrative synthesis of the four studies, the thesis develops a three-phase framework comprising exploring solution viability, operationalizing solutions, and scaling solution implementation. The framework explains how the socio-technical alignment problem evolves from reducing uncertainty around emerging digital solutions, through embedding workable socio-technical arrangements in customer operations, to making these arrangements sufficiently repeatable and adaptable across heterogeneous contexts. Across this process, socio-technical alignment extends within industrial providers and across customer and ecosystem boundaries. The associated outcomes progress from demonstrated sustainability potential, through realized sustainability value, to scaled sustainability value.

The thesis contributes to digital servitization research by conceptualizing digital servitization for industrial sustainability as an unfolding socio-technical alignment process across organizational boundaries. It further conceptualizes industrial providers as socio-technical change agents that support the technical and organizational changes required to realize sustainability value beyond specific contexts. Finally, it shows that scaling digital servitization requires broader socio-technical configurations surrounding digital solution use to make them sufficiently repeatable and adaptable across heterogeneous contexts. These insights advance understanding of how industrial providers can translate the sustainability potential of digital servitization into realized sustainability value and extend this value across broader industrial contexts.