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Innovation, institutional entrepreneurship, and social cooperation
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DOI：10.1007/s11187-026-01255-y.png)
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Abstract
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Drawing from a wide body of scholarship, this paper provides a systematic review of how institutional entrepreneurs address the cooperation dilemmas surrounding innovation. Integrating rich empirical evidence into the equilibrium-of-the-game paradigm, we examine the strategies they employ to mitigate two central problems: coordination and opportunism. To address coordination problems, often modeled with assurance games, institutional entrepreneurs mobilize resources, establish infrastructure, and shape participants’ future expectations and normative beliefs. To counter opportunism, typically modeled with prisoners’ dilemma games, they internalize norms, develop third-party enforcement mechanisms, and reshape governance structures. By synthesizing and categorizing these strategies across firms, communities, industries, and knowledge regimes, this paper clarifies how bottom-up institutional mechanisms sustain innovation. It also highlights polycentric knowledge governance driven by institutional entrepreneurs who possess inherent adaptability, creativity, and reflexivity, enabling them to devise solutions to collective action problems. Drawing from game theory, the paper shows how institutional entrepreneurs can play important roles in overcoming cooperation dilemmas surrounding innovation. Integrating rich empirical evidence into the equilibrium-of-the-game paradigm, it identifies and categorizes the strategies that institutional entrepreneurs employ to address coordination and opportunism problems, which can be modeled with the assurance game and the prisoner’s dilemma game, respectively. Our findings highlight the institutional diversity of intellectual property rights and polycentric knowledge governance. They suggest that innovation policies should consider leveraging the self-governing capacities of industrial participants and stakeholders, encouraging them to foster social cooperation within and across firms, communities, industries, and knowledge regimes.
Keywords:
Innovation
Institutional entrepreneurship
Collective action
Social dilemma
Cooperation
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