Radical Institutional Innovation: A Multilevel Framework

Prior research explores how knowledge brokers can bring about technological innovation and the structural and network features of brokers, yet little attention focuses on how these micro-level broker relations and processes can have significant macro-level consequences. This dissertation begins to fill this gap by examining the role of brokers in creating radical institutional innovation. Drawing on research in innovation and institutional field emergence, I explore how entrepreneurs create institutional building blocks through brokering and diffusing knowledge, resources and capabilities in an emerging field. More specifically, I employ an ethnographic approach that uses semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and archival data over a 2-year period to examine Libyas rapid emergence of civil society after the fall of a dictator regime. A multi-level process framework emerging from the findings highlights the important role institutional brokers, actors embedded in both established institutions and in the emerging institutional field, play in bringing about radical institutional innovation. These institutional brokers do more than link organizations and individuals; they also transform ideas as they are ideally positioned to receive new and previously uncombined ideas. The framework developed illustrates the dynamics and mechanisms by which these institutional brokers bring about innovation and how their social position mediates their relation to the environment in which they are embedded, and drives their access to the resources and capabilities that support innovation. The findings supplement the rather static portrait of the role of knowledge brokers with a more in-depth understanding of the innovation process these individuals and organizations participate in as they create radical institutional innovation. The framework also extends current views of institutional field emergence by revealing the important, but often missed dynamics of bottom-up strategic action and institutional brokerage as critical drivers of institutional emergence.