The role of institutional entrepreneurship in standard wars: the case of Blu-ray Disc

Abstract

The study is to use institutional entrepreneurship perspective to complement the functionalist’s viewpoint to understand the process underlying collective action in a mature eco-system and how institutional entrepreneurs manage critical stakeholder relations, collective action and discursive activities in technical standard change processes. The standard war of Sony Blu-ray Disc vs. Toshiba HD DVD is used as a critical and intrinsic case. The functionalist’s viewpoints have paid much attentions to the numbers of customers adopting new technologies, and etc. By means of institutional entrepreneurship perspective, it claims that it does not matter about the number and amount, but it does matter about how focal firms make the markets believe that they have the abilities to win standard wars. The study further claims that the variables studied in functionalist’s viewpoint also have the meanings of institutional entrepreneurship perspective. Moreover, the BD and HD DVD standards are incremental innovations in a mature field where there are many things are settled down. Focal firms can easily forecast the expectations of the dominant institutional logics. The study contributes that institutional entrepreneurship perspective still provides the process insight to complement the functionalist’s viewpoint. This perspective can be applied in emerging field, where it is no dominant logics and the innovations are likely to be radical. The BD case represents a critical case. It can makes possible naturalistic generalization to other similar contexts. Eisenhardt’s principles are used to build theory from the case study. I borrowed techniques of open coding to analyze the data. The findings show that collective action (including critical stakeholder management and structuring collaboration capabilities) and discursive activities are the central features of institutional entrepreneurship. They have mutual relationship with the institutional entrepreneur’s resources (power and legitimacy). Furthermore, good collective action and discursive activities can lead to network effects and product performance