Technology rewind: The emergence of the analog entrepreneurial ecosystem

Research has focused on the ecosystems of forces that influence how organizations pursue opportunities in new industries, nascent markets, and novel technologies. However, there is an emerging, but unstudied, ecosystem supporting entrepreneurial activities in legacy industries, mature markets, and based on (seemingly) obsolete technologies—the analog entrepreneurial ecosystem (AEE). To develop a framework to explain this phenomenon and guide entrepreneurs and managers operating in this ecosystem, a theory of the AEE is proposed. The theory explains the ecosystem’s main components and delineates the forces driving its emergence. The model contributes to research on ecosystems, technology reemergence, and management in mature markets and has implications for organizations pursuing opportunities outside the digital ecosystem and based on legacy products.

Organizing Form, Experimentation, and Performance: Innovation in the Nascent Civilian Drone Industry

Our aim is to explore whether the benefits to firms of using community-based innovation extend to nascent markets: uncertain, high-velocity settings with novel, often complex products. Grounded in a rare empirical comparison, we closely track the two ventures (one using community-based innovation and the other firm-based) that pioneered the na2scent civilian drone market. We unpack how each addressed the three major innovations that shaped this setting. Our primary insight is that the firm organizing form for innovation performs best relative to communities in nascent markets. Firms have a coordination advantage that enables quickly and accurately targeting experimentation and problem-solving processes to reduce the many specific uncertainties that characterize these markets. Although communities can help, their task self-selection advantage works best in stable settings such as established markets with simple products (e.g., modular software) and in ambiguous settings in which low-cost randomness pays off. Broadly, we contribute a theoretical framework that identifies how organizing form and problem type jointly shape innovation performance. Most important, uncertainty forms a boundary condition for when firms should rely on firm-based (versus community-based) organizing for innovation.

Speciation in nascent markets: Collective learning through cultural and material scaffolding

The construction of market infrastructure is a key component of market formation. In this article, we explore when and how this process leads to the fragmentation of a nascent market. We study the emergence of new markets in the context of social and impact investing in the UK during the period 1999-2019. We identify a recursive process of building the cultural and material infrastructure of the market, which we label cultural and material scaffolding, that drives collective learning by envisioning alternative futures and conducting institutional trials. We show how this scaffolding process explains the split between the social investment and the impact investment markets, which we theorize as market speciation. We identify two scope conditions under which we expect speciation to occur: field overlap and material anchoring. The paper contributes to the literature on market formation, and to the empirical understanding of how social and impact investment have emerged.

Social Consequences of Nascent Markets: Emergence and Growth of Begging in 1859-1880 Denver

This study explores indigence as a potential by-product of newly-formed markets, and inquires into the factors from which this indigence might develop. Both are addressed via historical research, in the context of 19th-century Denver, Colorado, U.S., using beggars as a proxy for the indigent. Data from period newspapers indicates that begging emerged concurrently with Denver’s 1858 foundation. By 1880 it reached significant proportions. Consistent with the literature, Denver begging derived from interrelated micro, meso, and macro factors: Immigration, venture failure, vice, economic reactivation, proletarianization, lack of social support, government policy, environmental degradation, racial discrimination, and personal choice. These ten factors mirror some of the issues still confronting Denver and other cities/countries today. We conclude that indigence does not necessarily result from personal flaws, nor is it an anomaly of otherwise well-operating markets. It can be a byproduct of larger, more complex market systems, exacerbated by the canons of laissez-faire economics. Historical marketing research enhances how current market issues are understood.

Parallel Play: Startups, Nascent Markets, and Effective Business-model Design

Prior research has advanced several explanations for entrepreneurial success in nascent markets but leaves a key imperative unexplored: the business model. By studying five ventures in a nascent financial-technology market, we develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding how entrepreneurs effectively design business models: parallel play. Similar to parallel play by preschoolers, entrepreneurs engaged in parallel play interweave action, cognition, and timing to accelerate learning about a novel world. Specifically, they (1) borrow from peers and focus on established substitutes for their services or products, (2) test assumptions, then commit to a broad business-model template, and (3) pause before elaborating the activity system. The insights from our framework contribute to research on optimal distinctiveness and to the learning and evolutionary-adjustment literatures. More broadly, we blend organization theory with a fresh theoretical lens—business-model processes—to highlight how organizations actually work and create value.