Market innovation is a change in how business is done, not just the opening of a new market — and it succeeds only when the change is deliberately stabilized. Kjellberg, Azimont and Reid argue that markets are ongoing processes rather than fixed arenas. Innovators must therefore manage two forces at once: unsettling the current market configuration and anchoring the new one so that it holds (Industrial Marketing Management, vol. 44, 2015). Here are the core ideas supported in this article:
MARKETS ARE MADE, NOT FOUND
Building on the market-practice view, the authors treat markets as configurations that actors continuously produce through exchange, rule-setting and representation. Stability is an achievement that requires effort, not a natural state.
MARKET INNOVATION IS BROADER THAN PRODUCT INNOVATION
If markets are processes, innovation can target any element of the configuration. Four levers can be reconfigured:
• Market structure — redrawing who participates and how actors connect.
• Market devices — introducing new tools such as pricing models, platforms or contracts.
• Market behaviour — altering how buyers and sellers search, compare and transact.
• Market agents — reconstituting the actors themselves, their roles and their capabilities.
STABILIZING IS AS CENTRAL AS CHANGING.
A new configuration lasts only if a bounded network of buyers, sellers and goods is built and its interactions are channeled. Drawing on the special issue's cases, the authors identify four interrelated stabilizing mechanisms:
Mechanism #1: Institutionalizing norms and rules. It anchors legitimacy and expectations e.g. Standards, regulation, certification
Mechanism #2: Building devices and technical infrastructures. It anchors the material basis of exchange. E.g. Platforms, payment systems, logistics
Mechanism #3: Generating and disseminating images, models and representations. This anchors shared understanding of the market. E.g. Market maps, segmentations, statistics
Mechanism #4: Enacting practices, routines and habits to anchor day-to-day behaviour such as procurement routines, usage habits
IMPLICATIONS FOR EXECUTIVES
The central managerial challenge is balance: too much stabilization locks in the status quo; too little leaves the innovation fragile and easy for incumbents to reverse.
• Broaden the innovation agenda. Screen opportunities across structure, devices, behaviour and agents — not only products and services.
• Plan stabilization from day one. For each initiative, name the rules, infrastructure, representations and routines that will lock in the new configuration.
• Map the network you must enroll. Customers, suppliers, regulators and analysts each hold part of the market; innovation is a collective, not a unilateral, act.
• Expect countermoves. Destabilizing an incumbent's market invites others to destabilize yours; anticipate where they will push.
REFERENCES
Core paper: Kjellberg, H., Azimont, F. & Reid, E. (2015). Market innovation processes: Balancing stability and change. Industrial Marketing Management, 44, 4–12.
1. Callon, M. (Ed.) (1998). The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell — the foundational argument that markets are performed by economic theories and devices.
2. Kjellberg, H. & Helgesson, C.-F. (2006). Multiple versions of markets: Multiplicity and performativity in market practice. Industrial Marketing Management, 35(7), 839–855 — the exchange, normalizing and representational practices behind market change.
3. Nenonen, S., Kjellberg, H., Pels, J. et al. (2014). A new perspective on market dynamics: Market plasticity and the stability–fluidity dialectics. Marketing Theory, 14(3), 269–289 — why some markets are more malleable than others.While innovation processes in principle are recognized to have both a technological and a market dimension, and despite Schumpeter’s explicit recognition of market innovation as a particular category of innovation, innovation research has largely focused on technological aspects. The relationship between innovation and markets has been poorly investigated. Recently, the market shaping literature has put a specific focus on the on-going constitution of markets and underscores that there is scope for strategic action to alter markets, directing attention to new objects and means of innovation to be studied.