Unsustainable wildlife trade imperils thousands of species, but efforts to identify and reduce these threats are hampered by rapidly evolving commercial markets. Businesses trading wildlife-derived products innovate to remain competitive, and the patents they file to protect their innovations also provide an early-warning of market shifts. Here, we develop a novel machine-learning approach to analyse patent-filing trends and apply it to patents filed from 1970-2020 related to six traded taxa that vary in trade legality, threat level, and use type: rhinoceroses, pangolins, bears, sturgeon, horseshoe crabs, and caterpillar fungus. We found 27,308 patents, showing 130% per-year increases, compared to a background rate of 104%. Innovation led to diversification, including new fertilizer products using illegal-to-trade rhinoceros horn, and novel farming methods for pangolins. Stricter regulation did not generally correlate with reduced patenting. Patents reveal how wildlife-related businesses predict, adapt to, and create market shifts, providing data to underpin proactive wildlife-trade management approaches.

This symposium extends the discourse on the non-linearity in industry evolution by exploring the multitude of uncertainties that characterizes nascent industries and how firms’ distinct ways of addressing various uncertainties can dramatically shift the process of industry evolution. Five featured papers discuss the uncertainties associated with technologies, demand, and ecosystems in nascent industries and investigate the changes in evolutionary patterns, innovation trajectories, and knowledge generation. The papers use both quantitative and qualitative methods across different empirical settings, approaching the topic of uncertainty and industry evolution from complementary angles. The Spillover Effect of Innovation Failure in Nascent Industries Author: Hee Yeul (Tom) Kwon; U. of Southern California Author: Hyo Kang; U. of Southern California Exaptation and Technological Evolution: A Study of Carbon Capture Technologies Author: Ho-Wei Hsu; HEC Paris Author: Denisa Mindruta; HEC Paris Following Virtute and Knowledge: New Venture Creation in Nascent Industries Author: Jacopo Manotti; Politecnico di Milano School of Management Author: Silvia Sanasi; Free U. of Bozen-Bolzano Author: Antonio Ghezzi; Politecnico di Milano School of Management The Interplay of Data and Actors in Early Platform Emergence Author: Jack Lewis Fraser; Said Business School Author: Elizabeth J. Altman; U. of Massachusetts, Lowell Author: Pinar Ozcan; Oxford U., Saïd Business School Firms as Influencers: Shaping Industries through Knowledge and Collaboration Author: Mana Heshmati; U. of Washington

Wild species are under increasing threat, including from unsustainable harvest of wildlife products for commercial trade. Understanding how and why wildlife markets evolve is key to developing more proactive approaches to preventing unsustainable harvest. As in any other commercial sector, businesses who use wildlife-derived products must innovate to remain competitive, and patenting is a key process by which these innovations are protected from exploitation by others. Here we use machine learning methods to scrape and categorise the 27,308 patents filed between 1970 and 2020 that relate to new products or processes associated with six taxa variously threatened by wildlife trade, but with distinct differences in their uses, trade chains and geographies: rhinos, pangolins, bears, sturgeon, horseshoe crabs, and cordyceps caterpillar fungus. Our findings show increasing trends in patent filing for all taxa, above the background rate of increase for general global patent filing during our study period. Patents revealed diversifying product types, such as the emergence of agricultural products using rhinoceros horn; and processes to produce non-wild alternatives, such as methods for farming pangolins or synthesising sturgeon caviar. The introduction of wildlife trade regulations did not generally correlate with any decline in patenting rate, apart from a decrease in pangolin patenting following their inclusion in CITES Appendix I that halted international commercial trade in 2016. We show that patent data provide significant insights into how businesses view the future of the market for wildlife products. Regular, ongoing scans of patent data can reveal emerging trends in commercial interest in wild taxa, and identify novel product types and key entities who plan to commercialise different wildlife-derived products. Working with businesses to encourage innovation related to sustainable sourcing of, or alternatives to, products derived from threatened taxa presents a proactive approach towards harnessing commercial forces towards sustainability.

Early stage, technology-driven ventures must navigate a trade-off between specialization and flexibility in contexts where the optimal path is unknown. Much of the digital entrepreneurship literature has construed digital technologies as highly malleable, affording founders with the ability to adapt and redeploy the technology to other ends as needed. However, recent work on the ontology of digital artifacts proposes a greater role for external actors – such as users – in shaping technologies through their interaction with it, limiting the agency of founders. To explore the interplay of actors and technology in shaping the growth trajectory of the firm, we conduct an inductive study of six ventures commercializing machine-learning capabilities. We show that the incorporation of training data builds an inadvertent rigidity into the machine learning capability, while simultaneously limiting the pool of actors who interact with the technology. This results in a degree of specialization that is hard to reverse, even in circumstances where the interests of founders and investors demand a return to a flexible approach. Our findings advance theory in digital entrepreneurship by introducing the possibility of categories of digital artifacts that do not share the malleability of digital technologies broadly.

Organizations at the boundary of two institutional fields are often required to meet contradictory but interrelated demands. While transcendence – accepting both sets of demands as necessary and complementary – has been shown to be an important response to such paradoxes, achieving it places significant cognitive and behavioural strain on managers. Despite the importance of ‘and/both’ approaches for the survival of institutionally pluralistic organizations, we still know little about the practices that managers resort to when initial efforts to achieve transcendence break down. Through a longitudinal study of a joint-venture spanning two institutional fields, we demonstrate that managers can address otherwise insurmountable paradoxical tensions through an emphasis on the interplay of their temporal structures. By deconstructing conflicting demands into their respective temporal qualities of temporal depth – defined as the span into the past and future that they typically consider – and temporal horizons – measured by the frequency of milestones within this span – managers can process paradoxical demands in novel ways. Through a process of temporal work, managers on both sides of the institutional divide were able to negotiate a new, shared temporal depth that accommodated the temporal horizons of both sides. We show that this process enabled managers to achieve a form of transcendence, providing a structure within which to consider the demands on both sides as necessary and complementary, which was not previously possible. We suggest that ‘zooming in’ to focus on the complexity of temporal structures can unveil novel and surprising sensemaking processes amongst managers navigating paradoxes.

Research applying a socio-cognitive lens to disruptive innovation has often focused on overall incumbent response. This relies on the notion of binary frames and specialised framing distributions within an organisation where members of a particular unit hold similar frames. Such a conceptualisation fails to account for intra-firm and intra-unit heterogeneity in the framing of a disruptive innovation. To explore the framing processes involved, we conducted an in-depth case study of the response of Insurecorp plc – a UK based General Insurance provider – to the rise of online aggregator platforms between 2002 and 2007. We map different frames across three separate framing dimensions: Challenge Type, Response Urgency and Firm Heritage, to develop a multiplexed model of framing. Although framing has often been seen to be homogenous across an organisation, we suggest that frames are multiplexed and holographically distributed such that conflicting frames can be held by members of the same organisational department or group. While previous research has suggested that multiple, divergent frames may result in conflict and organizational inertia, we demonstrate that it allows for more agile and fluid responses through the pursuit of equifinality. That is, managers can leverage the ambiguity generated by multiple, non-binary frames to select the same response strategies for different reasons. We propose that multiplexed frames can enable an organisation to trial and adaptively switch back and forth between different strategic responses to disruptive innovation as circumstances change.

Research applying a socio-cognitive lens to disruptive digital innovation often fails to account for intra-firm heterogeneity in how an established incumbent frames and responds to disruptive innovation. To explore the heterogeneous framing processes involved within a firm, we conducted an in-depth case study of the response of a multinational insurance group to a digitally-led disruptive innovation: the rise of internet-based general insurance aggregator platforms between 2002 and 2007. We map different response frames across three separate framing dimensions: the Challenge Type, Response Urgency and Firm Heritage, and explore their interplay in shaping responses to disruption. We introduce the idea of multiplexed framing – comprised of multiple, non-binary frames – and propose that these are holographically distributed – such that conflicting frames can be held by members of the same organizational department or group. This allows managers to leverage the ambiguity generated by multiplexed frames to select the same response strategies for different reasons leading to an equifinal resolution of conflict. We show how such framing enables the organization to trial and adaptively iterate between different strategic responses to disruptive innovation, particularly amid high uncertainty and ambiguity.

Coping with major change is a formidable challenge for organizations, triggering a process of sensemaking as managers must confront competing strategic accounts of how the firm is expected to behave ‘now’ versus going forward. If unreconciled, these competing accounts can drive cognitive breakdowns as managers attend to pressing present demands that clash with those of the desired future. While ‘temporal work’ to create coherent accounts of the present-past-future is one way to address such impasses, at times it is hard to achieve coherence due to disparity between current demands and future expectations. From our in-depth account of Fincorp, we explore how organizational members address this challenge by adjusting their orientation in time while engaging in temporal work to ‘discount’ the fixation on the present and overcome seemingly irreconcilable conflicts between present and future demands. We contribute to the literature on temporal sensemaking, and organizational change by showing how managers engage in temporally reflexive thinking –a kind of “mental time travel” – in which they make decisions in the present from the perspective of the future. In doing so, they mitigate the significance of present concerns that impede organizational change by using “hindsight” as a cognitive tool to make decisions in the present.

Research has shown that managerial cognition and cognitive frames play a prominent role in shaping organizational strategy under conditions of market uncertainty and ambiguity. While this work often has implications for understanding incumbent responses to disruptive innovation, relatively few attempts have been made to apply a cognitive lens directly to cases of disruptive innovation. Where a cognitive approach has been applied, it has often incorporated binary or dichotomous understandings of cognitive framing: often involving an opportunity/threat heuristic Recent work has begun to suggest that cognitive positions held by organizational members can incorporate multi- dimensional and non-binary cognitive frames. This paper explores the cognitive processes involved in incumbent organizations following the emergence of a disruptive innovation. We conduct an in-depth case study of the response of Aviva plc. to a disruptive innovation - the rise of general insurance aggregator sites between 2005 and 2007 -to develop a grounded model of the cognitive forces involved. We propose that organisational members develop different framing positions which can be mapped across three separate framing dimensions. Framing positions are distributed holographically throughout the organisation such that conflicting frames can be held by members of the same organisational department or group. The framing positions held by members influence organizational response strategies to disruptive innovations.