We are happy to announce that Florian Weber, Julian Lehmann, Lorenz Graf-Vlachy and Andreas König received three prestigious awards at the 2017 Annual Conference of the European Academy of Management in Glasgow for their paper “Incumbents’ Sensemaking and Responses to Institutional Challenges of the Sharing Economy”. The paper received the Best Paper Award of the Special Interest Group “Strategic Management”, the Best Paper Award of the Track “Behavioral Strategy” and a Recognition for being one of three runner ups for the EURAM 2017 Best Paper Award (best three out of 1220 papers submitted to the conference).
The study works towards better understanding why incumbent organizations initially struggle to respond to discontinuous innovation. Based on a case study of the hotel industry as the first major sector to face the emergence of fast-growing ‘sharing economy’ businesses, the authors illustrate how discontinuous innovation can have important implications far beyond the technology itself and challenge commonly established industry institutions. Weber et al. identify three cognitive frames that result from incumbent managers’ sensemaking of these institutional challenges: sense of unfairness, confusion and marginalization of new entrants. First, incumbent managers perceived competition from new entrants as unfair due to the violations of regulative and normative rules. Second, new entrants’ deviating normative and cognitive institutions caused collective confusion among incumbents. Third, incumbents tend to marginalize the competitive threat from new entrants. Even though our findings suggest that institution-infused cognitive frames represent barriers to adaptation and strongly contribute to early incumbent inertia, they also indicate that these frames can function as catalyst for incumbents to question established rules and engage in institutional work. Overall, the study integrates research on technological change and institutions by revealing the importance of institutional violations for managerial sensemaking in the context of discontinuous change.