Breaking the Dam Walls : Overcoming Institutional Barriers to Innovation

Sammanfattning

Hydropower is the backbone of Sweden's electricity system and, with theexpansion of intermittent sources such as wind and solar, has taken on a roleas the system's primary source of flexible balancing power. Most of thecountry's plants are over forty years old and the policy ambition of reaching100 per cent renewable electricity production by 2040 rests on themodernisation of this ageing fleet. This depends on the adoption of innovations— yet suppliers report that innovations with documented value meet sustainedresistance. Neo-institutional theory offers a lens to analyse the resistance andvalue-based selling (VBS) can describe supplier practices, but the two literatureshave developed in isolation. This study connects them by theorising VBScapabilities as the micro-level mechanism through which suppliers performinstitutional work. The aim is to analyse how that work can legitimiseinnovations in path-dependent, asset-intensive B2B industries, with Swedishhydropower as the empirical case. The design is abductive, iterating betweentheory and qualitative interview data across buyer, supplier, academic andindustry-expert perspectives. Barriers were initially organised along Scott'sthree pillars — regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive — but the analysisshowed that barriers cut across pillars and condition one another withinthemes. The refined framework reorganises barriers around themes, linksbarriers into dependent chains, and treats material artefacts as a mediatingstructure. The study contributes a theoretically grounded framework thatspecifies how institutional work is materially and temporally enacted, providinga foundation for future empirical testing of VBS in institutionalised B2Bcontexts