TY - JOUR
T1 - Bricolage versus breakthrough
T2 - Distributed and embedded agency in technology entrepreneurship
AU - Garud, Raghu
AU - Karnøe, Peter
N1 - Funding Information:
The oil embargo of 1974 galvanized the US government to search for alternative energy sources. Representing a transition from the National Science Foundation ( NSF, 1973 ), the SERI was empowered to use NASA’s expertise. Under this legislation, around US$ 486 million was spent on wind power R&D between 1974 and 1992 ( Gipe, 1995 ). Seventy-five percent of this was set aside for contractors developing large size wind turbines and the remaining for those developing small-scale turbines ( Karnøe, 1993; Gipe, 1995; Righter, 1996 ). Neither of these initiatives resulted in a viable wind turbine technology.
Funding Information:
This is a fully collaborative project. The research was made possible by a grant from the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Technology Management (CISTEMA), Denmark. The paper has benefited from feedback offered by those attending Field Studies on Organizational Complexity, INFORMS, Atlanta, 1996, SCANCOR Conference on Samples of the Future, Stanford, 1998 and Conference on Knowledge and Innovation, Helsinki, 2000. We are indebted to Andres Garcia for his considerable help with earlier drafts of this paper. We thank Daniel Beunza, Roger Dunbar, Michelle Gittelman, Sanjay Jain, Kristian Kreiner, Arun Kumaraswamy and Dara Szyliowicz for their helpful comments. We thank Scott Shane, S. Venkataraman and anonymous reviewers for Research Policy whose key inputs have shaped this paper. We thank many people from the Danish and American wind turbine paths, especially B.T. Madsen, Peter Hjuler Jensen, Flemming Rasmussen, F.S. Stoddard, Paul Gipe and Per Dannemand Andersen.
PY - 2003/2
Y1 - 2003/2
N2 - We develop a perspective on technology entrepreneurship as involving agency that is distributed across different kinds of actors. Each actor becomes involved with a technology, and, in the process, generates inputs that result in the transformation of an emerging technological path. The steady accumulation of inputs to a technological path generates a momentum that enables and constrains the activities of distributed actors. In other words, agency is not only distributed, but it is embedded as well. We explicate this perspective through a comparative study of processes underlying the emergence of wind turbines in Denmark and in United States. Through our comparative study, we flesh out "bricolage" and "breakthrough" as contrasting approaches to the engagement of actors in shaping technological paths.
AB - We develop a perspective on technology entrepreneurship as involving agency that is distributed across different kinds of actors. Each actor becomes involved with a technology, and, in the process, generates inputs that result in the transformation of an emerging technological path. The steady accumulation of inputs to a technological path generates a momentum that enables and constrains the activities of distributed actors. In other words, agency is not only distributed, but it is embedded as well. We explicate this perspective through a comparative study of processes underlying the emergence of wind turbines in Denmark and in United States. Through our comparative study, we flesh out "bricolage" and "breakthrough" as contrasting approaches to the engagement of actors in shaping technological paths.
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U2 - 10.1016/S0048-7333(02)00100-2
DO - 10.1016/S0048-7333(02)00100-2
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0037307560
SN - 0048-7333
VL - 32
SP - 277
EP - 300
JO - Research Policy
JF - Research Policy
IS - 2 SPEC.
ER -