•This article defines and delineates combinatorial market innovation.•A longitudinal case study of the development of the digital therapeutics market is presented.•We develop a conceptualization of ...combinatorial market innovation related to five intertwined market subprocesses.•We identify three types of intertwinement – sequential interrelation, mutual reinforcement, and interference.•The article calls for future research on market intersections and overlaps.
This paper investigates market innovation that takes place at the intersection of previously weakly connected markets. Based on a longitudinal study of the development of the digital therapeutics market, we delineate the concept of combinatorial market innovation as a market innovation process that is characterized by the deliberate synthesis of market subprocesses from two (or more) existing markets. We develop a conceptualization of combinatorial market innovation related to five market subprocesses (configuring exchange agents, qualifying offerings, fashioning modes of exchange, generating market representations, and establishing market norms). Focusing on how these processes interact, we identify three distinct types of intertwinement – sequential interrelation, mutual reinforcement, and interference. We also reflect on the need for market innovation studies to more strongly consider overlaps and adjacencies between markets and market systems.
This paper explores paradoxical tensions and their management in modular solution networks on digital platforms. A case study approach was adopted to examine how two firms in the lighting facility ...and ICT industries use digital platforms to coordinate their diverse, large and dynamic modular solution networks. Our findings reveal that due to contradictory goals in offering diverse customized solutions, solution providers with digital platforms are facing several paradoxical tensions between flexibility and efficiency, control and autonomy, and standardization and customization. We find that solution providers cope with these paradoxes through implementing two simultaneous mechanisms: unification and diversification. While the diversification mechanism aims at increasing variety among modules and module providers, unification focuses on forming similarities among them. These mechanisms are made possible through digital platform features, such as algorithms, online communities and platform access. This study contributes to the B2B literature by highlighting the nested nature of paradoxical tensions in the context of modular solution networks and by identifying mechanisms for managing these paradoxes. It also offers practical tools to solution providers to identify and manage paradoxical tensions in platform-based modular solution networks.
•This study reveals three types of paradoxes in platform-based solution networks.•These paradoxes can be managed by unification and diversification mechanisms.•These mechanisms are made possible through digital platform features.•The study also offers practical tools to identify and manage these paradoxes.
In many knowledge-intensive business-to-business settings the locus of interaction has shifted from stable, discrete, and articulated products and services to the exchange of somewhat nebulous ...capacities of problem-solving, innovation and R&D services. In these exchanges, tensions and conflicts between actors can arise in seeking clarity as to what is being exchanged while attempting to keep the interaction open for future adjustments to the scope and content of the exchange. We combine a longitudinal case study of a chemical services firm with Galison’s (1999) concept of a trading zone to assess how actors offer, value and exchange incremental innovation. Focusing on the contentious nature of innovation processes, examine how incremental innovation is formatted as a tradable service and argue that trading zones complement relational processes and contractual arrangements by allowing actors to preserve their own logics and expertise pertaining to innovation.
Recent debates in public health and social sciences have shown how biofinancialization has been fuelled by patents' transformation into 'patent-as-assets'. This paper traces the historical ...construction of one such patent-as-asset bundle: the multi-billion worth architecture of patents behind the hepatitis C blockbuster drug sofosbuvir. Following this process from the late 1980s to present times, we highlight the ontological entanglements of pharmaceutical patents and the scientific, legal, commercial and political contestations that result from the focal firms' assetization projects. By shining a light on these entanglements, our paper points to the extraordinary historical conditions required for the assetization of drug patents as well as to their vulnerability to contestations. In particular, we highlight new forms of patent activism that threaten the 'asset condition' of high-priced pharmaceuticals.
•The article considers synchronicity as a crucial component of health policymaking.•An analysis of the pandemic agreement draft highlights opportunities and risks.•The draft invokes ‘timeliness’ but ...leaves its definition open to interpretation.•Global equity and solidarity can only be achieved through enabling synchronicity.
Timeliness is repeatedly referenced in the World Health Organization (WHO) Pandemic Agreement negotiation draft, published in March 2024. However, the draft remains vague with regard to what is considered timely. Health policymaking should be much more conscious of the time scales it evokes and implements in order to support global equity and solidarity. The Pandemic Agreement negotiation draft could be made more specific to foster global synchronicity by: (1) replacing ‘best endeavor’ language with enforceable timelines, particularly for benefit sharing mechanisms, (2) mandating an automatically triggered time-bound IP waiver for pandemic health technologies to accelerate manufacturing and distribution scale-up to global levels, and (3) strengthening the pandemic fund and debt relief mechanisms to safeguard financial resources to enable global synchronicity for future pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. In summary, global solidarity during a pandemic requires more attention to synchronicity by ensuring the simultaneous implementation and rollout of measures to prevent, contain, or end a pandemic in different countries or regions.
This paper investigates how early venture entrepreneurs engage in socially embedded practices to resource their firm. We contribute to an emerging literature that calls for a shift in perspective ...from “resource” as an object to “resourcing” as a practice. This shift entails a focus away from whom entrepreneurs know toward how they engage with their venture's social contexts. Through the analysis of an in–depth longitudinal case study of a life–science venture, we show that social resourcing practices are more reminiscent of a creative coping with ambiguous and ever–changing environments over time than of “heroic” strategizing. We explore how entrepreneurs mobilize and creatively combine their social resources at hand, seek resources through engaging with other practice nets, negotiate differences between practice nets, and reflectively adapt their resourcing practices toward emerging resource contexts in ways that we describe as “riding the practice waves” of social resourcing.
This article describes the experiences of two market studies scholars who became involved in an Applied Research Centre aimed at developing a societally valuable market in digital health - an ...experience that ended in failure. We introduce the concept of epistemological liminality as a theoretical tool to problematise our own positionality as 'market experts' in this failed academic-industry-government collaboration around a concerned market. Liminality involved entering a transitional space-time in which our academic knowledge as market studies scholars was suspended, but where we failed to successfully move into a new epistemic space of 'applied market studies'. This state of suspension - and frustration - is a cautionary tale for the difficulties of linking different (and often contradictory) epistemic communities that meet in applied research. We stop short of providing a moral to this market (non)performance tale, but we do highlight the need for openness and debate on the knowledges that come together to make a market in such collaborations.
This article draws from two conceptual lenses – the sociology of expectations and market studies – to investigate the relationship between technology hype and market investments: which promises and ...expectations surround hype and how they come together to shape actors’ investments in an emerging market. We address this question through analysing a contemporary hype in a technology marketing context: digital healthcare. Our aim is to trace how market actors create, support and evaluate a market hype; how hype and market investments are related; and whether hype contributes to irreversibilities in shaping emerging market forms and categories. Our study indicates that hypes contribute tangibly to producing the market, not least by channelling financial, symbolic and material market investments. Furthermore, by highlighting how socio-economic, technological and policy promises become affectively loaded through circulation, we add a novel dimension to existing insights into the socio-cognitive construction of markets. We caution technology marketers, policymakers and investors against blindly following technology hype, especially when it encourages companies to engage in market investment that is unhinged from broader systems and societal, ethical or economic concerns.
This paper draws on the ethics of care to investigate how citizens grappled with ethical tensions in the mundane practice of grocery shopping at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. We use this case ...to address the broader question of what it means ‘to care’ in the context of a crisis. Based on a qualitative longitudinal cross-country interview study, we find that the pandemic transformed ordinary shopping spaces into places fraught with a sense of fear and vulnerability. Being forced to face one’s own vulnerability created an opportunity for individuals to relate to one another as significant others through a sense of “response-ability”, or the capacity of people to respond to ethical demands through situated ethical reasoning. We argue for a practical ethos of care in which seemingly small decisions such as how often to go shopping and how much to buy of a particular product serve as a means to relate to both specified and generalized others—and through this, ‘care with’ society. Our study contributes to displacing the continuing prevalence of an abstract and prescriptive morality in consumption ethics with a situated and affective politics of care. This vocabulary seems better suited to reflect on the myriad of small and unheroic care acts in times of crisis and beyond.
How does a social enterprise pursue its ethical mandate of social impact growth while navigating the perils of the most vulnerable stage in a venture’s life—scaling up? We observe a small inclusivity ...social enterprise attempting to scale up rapidly to create equality for people with disabilities throughout the world. Our embedded, ethnographic study is terminated with the venture’s unfortunate demise after their dramatic effort to scale up failed. By examining scaling decision-making and conflicts around creation reasoning longitudinally, our study identifies over-use of effectual logic—a creation reasoning type considered more ethical and more appropriate for high-innovativeness contexts than causal logic—as a major factor in the venture’s failure. From this insight, we extend the parameters of effectuation theory to scaling up and dimensionalize its ethical implications. Guidance for social entrepreneurs to scale up successfully while maintaining ethical integrity is also provided.
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