Abstract
Innovation studies have generally accepted that innovations and their institutional environment are co-evolving and that institutional change is necessary for technological change to take place. However, these studies do not account for innovations where institutional change is central to the innovation and technological novelties do not play a role per
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se. In this thesis I start from this idea of institutional innovation, which I define as innovation that introduces new ways of configuring existing technologies and the social environment. This thesis studies institutional innovations in two important ways. First, I analyze the diffusion of institutional innovations across space and time highlighting the structural heterogeneity in institutions across geographically separated locations. Second, I study how institutional innovations brought about by gatekeepers shape the selection of scientific and cultural outputs.
The spatial heterogeneity in institutions is central to the first two chapters. Chapter 2 identifies institutional conditions that affect the decisions made by platform companies to introduce their services in locations around the world. I study the case of Uber and specifically study in which cities they introduced their controversial service UberX. I argue that Uber is able to follow their globally mobile user base that carries the informal institutions supporting the introduction of their service in a particular location.
In chapter 3 I analyze to what extent the regional adoption of an organizational form is influenced by regional institutional conditions. I build on the idea that firms with new organizational forms can benefit from the local presence of institutionally related firms, which can facilitate institutional structures that legitimize this new organizational form. This chapter focuses on the case of the founding of renewable energy (RE) cooperatives in Germany. The main finding of this chapter is that at the local level the legitimation process is mostly influenced by the local presence of institutionally related organizations in different industries.
In chapter 4 the focus of this thesis shifts to the role of gatekeepers in the legitimization process. Chapter 4 studies scientific journals as gatekeepers of scientific knowledge production. In this gatekeeping process most journals tend to publish mainstream research that is in line with dominant scientific paradigms. The main finding in this chapter is that journals that challenge the conventions of scientific publishing (non-society-owned and open access journals), are providing more opportunities for novel research to be published than conventional journals.
Chapter 5 turns to the changes in gatekeeping that can take place over time. Specifically, in this chapter I am interested in the understudied periods of revival of specific markets. In periods of revival, gatekeepers usually tend to target different and broader audiences. This chapter shows us how inclusion criteria of gatekeepers change over time and as such how the same product can be subject to changing legitimacy standards over time.
In the concluding chapter 6, I reflect on the learnings from my study for institutional studies and innovation studies. In this final chapter I also devote a paragraph to the overarching notion of institutional innovation as introduced in chapter 1.
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