“Opening the Garbage Can, Finding Institutional Change”

Charged with the accelerated intensity of what Schumpeter has called a “gale of creative destruction,” the process underlying radical innovation is still largely unclear. After all, the transformative effect of two of the most radical innovations in the past decades, the Internet and the World Wide Web, do not follow the logic of incremental developments, or ideas about exogenous shocks. While recent attempts to resolve this conceptual puzzle have offered important revisions to current theory, this study identifies an entirely different mechanism of radical change, which is based on decision making theory. Using archival and interview data on the decisions of innovators and early adopters of grid computing, I argue that institutional change follows a revised garbage can model that encompasses the consequences of distributed decisions across different communities of practice. I show that innovators are initially motivated to develop solutions to local problems in their professional community. However, once they develop a novel solution they “open” it up, seeking to apply it to problems that occupy actors in other communities. Studying the subsequent deliberation of innovators as they identify problems beyond their field or research that could suit their new solution, and the discussions of lead users who are looking for solutions to their problems, I demonstrate the process of transformative institutional change. Through collaborations with solution-seeking users, innovators transform their technological paradigm. Applied to new sets of problems that are associated with different practices and organizational structures, innovators generate a new scope of activity. In the studied case, this newly established field has revolutionized research practices in diverse areas of science.