Research has highlighted that meta-organizations—organizations of organizations in which otherwise legally autonomous entities voluntarily collaborate toward system-level goals—can help their members respond to environmental pressures by reducing complexity and facilitating the development of innovation capabilities. However, far less is known about the dynamics within meta-organizations themselves, particularly how they adapt to technological changes or market-driven pressures on their membership base. Using a longitudinal study of an innovation initiative organized by one of the largest confederations of cooperatives in Europe, we examined the championing role of the confederation’s mutual fund in orchestrating change before the meta-organization could fall out of sync with the external environment. Our findings identify three key orchestration processes—breaking the inertia, empowering the periphery, and enrooting change —that led to significant governance renewal, stronger resourcing through external partnerships, and substantial expansion of the meta-organization’s identity boundaries. We contribute to the literature by advancing a grounded model of meta-organizational rejuvenation, which explains how meta-organizations, despite their inherent inertia, can proactively reconfigure themselves through dynamic pathways that unfold nonlinearly across all levels, up to the core of central leadership.
