After Invention: Engaging with Institutions to Advance Innovation Commercialization and Adoption

Abstract

Interactions between institutions and the actors embedded within them are a key part of understanding how innovations can be commercialized and adopted in complex, heavily institutionalized sectors. My dissertation begins with a cross-sector investigation on institutions before focusing on the healthcare sector, an example of a highly institutionalized sector. It is comprised of three papers investigating the ways actors – such as entrepreneurs and staff in healthcare service providers – work within, around, with and against the institutions that facilitate and hinder innovation commercialization and adoption. The first paper is a meta-analysis on the influence of macro-level factors on the entrepreneurial intention-behavior relationship: a key step to commercializing an innovation. We demonstrated that macro-level factors had little to no influence on the translation of entrepreneurial intention to behavior and proposed that aspiring entrepreneurs can overcome resource barriers at the national-level via interpersonal sources at the meso- and micro-level. In the second paper, a case study was conducted on a healthcare innovation ecosystem with a mandate to support the innovation commercialization of entrepreneurs. It shows how entrepreneurs attempt to change the conditions and institutions of the innovation ecosystem through interactions with innovation ecosystem leaders within their reach, shifting the trajectory of the innovation ecosystem. For the third paper, I developed a qualitative case study on a large healthcare service provider in a public health system to describe how actors engage in institutional work to overcome innovation adoption barriers. I show how agents further embed themselves and their work in existing institutions to legitimize innovations for adoption by end-users. I also depict how agents leverage organizational processes and values to change institutional barriers in the process of facilitating innovation adoption.