The disruptive impact of platform businesses on local economies has received much attention, but virtually none has been paid to the factors that impact platforms’ decisions about where to locate their activities. The novel, disruptive nature of platforms limits the relevance of traditional theories about location decisions. We argue that local institutional conditions and global legitimacy spillover affect the choices of platform businesses about where to operate. We analyze the controversial case of ride-hailing platform Uber, an app-based service that matches uncertified chauffeurs with passengers. We find that Uber showed a preference for cities that promote competition and innovation. A spillover analysis shows how Uber leveraged their global pool of customers by choosing cities whose visitors were already familiar with Uber’s service. Our study illuminates the key role played by the brand’s mobile customer base as global carriers of legitimacy for Uber’s controversial innovation.

This paper analyses the evolution of renewable energy cooperatives, examining all such cooperatives founded in German districts between 2006 and 2016. The rise of the cooperative form in renewable energy production is a prominent example of the strong involvement of users in market formation. We investigate the effects of 'institutional relatedness', arguing that renewable energy cooperatives can leverage the organizational knowledge and the legitimacy gained by cooperatives active in other industries in the same district. Using an organizational ecology approach, we find that the local presence of cooperatives in other industries indeed supported the founding of renewable energy cooperatives.

In innovation studies a fundamental distinction lies between incremental and radical innovation. However, our understanding of radical innovation faces limitations in two respects. Firstly, research generally has concentrated on technological innovation by firms diffusing through markets. Secondly, current theorizing lacks a clear definition of radical innovation, with terms like 'radical,' 'breakthrough,' and 'disruptive' often being used interchangeably. To address these shortcomings, we propose a broader approach to radical innovation based on an institutional-theoretical perspective. In particular, we start from the notion of the 'categorical imperative', penalizing innovations that don't align with established categories individuals use to comprehend the world and establish expectations. This institutional approach facilitates the theoretical differentiation between innovations taking place within existing categories and those that redefine categories or establish new categories, thereby unifying concepts of incremental, breakthrough, disruptive, and radical innovation under a comprehensive theoretical framework. We argue that this approach offers a framework to distinguish and compare various innovation terminologies and theories. Furthermore, it allows for more comprehensive innovation theories, extending beyond biases towards technology, firms and markets.

The aim of this paper is to investigate to what extent the understanding of market categories changes over time and how this is reflected in the importance of different category signals in periods of category maturation and revival. We test the changing influence of different types of category signals on inclusion rates of surf music compilation albums, which represent the understanding of “surf music” from a market-based perspective. We find that “elaborate” signals to the category label of surf music showed to be important during both the stage of maturity and revival. However, restricted category signals using surf slang actually lost their importance over time. Finally, signaling surf-related locations had no effect in early times, but increased chances of inclusion during a revival. By addressing these changes over time in the importance of category signals, we add to recent studies on mechanisms of categorization during different stages of category development.

The study of innovation places primary emphasis on studying technological change. In particular, radical innovations have been defined as innovations embodying new technologies that create new markets or disrupt existing ones (Dahlin and Behrens, 2005;Garcia and Calantone, 2003). Most of these studies on radical innovation are based on the Schumpeterian idea that radical technological change can undermine the competitive advantage of incumbent firms by rendering their established technology, and their underlying competencies, irrelevant (Schumpeter, 1934;Tushman and Anderson, 1986). However, innovations also come with institutional change, which is especially the case for radical innovations that usually do not resonate with existing regulations, norms and values (Freeman and Perez, 1988).Since the 1980's, a growing body of literature has paid attention to the effects of institutions on innovation. With the elaboration of the notion of technological regimes (or paradigms) came a conceptual shift from studying technological change to studying the co-evolution of institutional and technological factors (Constant, 1987;Dosi, 1982;Geels, 2002;Nelson and Winter, 1982;Rip and Kemp, 1998). Technological regimes or paradigms are cognitive structures that relate to "technicians' beliefs about what is feasible or at least worth attempting" (Nelson and Winter, 1982, pp. 258-259). This positions an emerging technology in an institutional environment that is determined by dominant evaluation schemata based on accepted technologies. These paradigms and regimes are treated as selection environments, which determines what technologies are successful and become widespread (Dosi, 1982;Van den Belt and Rip, 1987). As such, Garud and Rappa (1994) have argued that for technology to progress, researchers' individual beliefs about technology and the form and function of technological artefacts should resonate with the institutionalized evaluation routines that shape the direction of technological progress at the macro-level.While early studies focused on how beliefs of firms and technicians shape the technological regimes, Kaplan and Tripsas ( 2008) developed a life-cycle model of technological change that focuses on the beliefs and frames of a wider array of actors. They argue that the technological frames -i.e. lenses through which different actors define and interpret a technology -of producers, users and institutional actors interact in shaping the development of collective frames around the meaning of new technologies. While this shifts the exclusive attention away from the producer-side of innovation by taking into account more actors, most studies still depart from the notion of innovation as essentially technological change. Indeed, scholars of radical innovation have concentrated on products or the production process and as such radical innovation tends to be equated This thesis takes a more structural approach to studying the legitimization processes of what I will call 'institutional innovations'. Hargrave and Van de Ven (20...