Building the World: How Entrepreneurs Create and Legitimize Material Innovations

Licentiatavhandling, 2026

Many of today's sustainability challenges originate in industrial practices that are difficult for established actors to change. Entrepreneurs, by contrast, are increasingly recognized as key agents capable of bringing about alternative materials and practices to replace unsustainable ones. However, many entrepreneurs tend to remain stuck in niches and fail to reach broader markets. Research to date has also largely focused on how entrepreneurs build and scale innovations in software products and business model innovation, leaving the role of materiality comparatively underexplored. This thesis therefore asks how entrepreneurs build and legitimize material innovations with the potential to address some of the most pressing societal challenges, and what institutional conditions enable or constrain this process, given that many material innovations must function in physical environments and conform to regulatory and industrial constraints.

To address these questions, this thesis draws on a practice-theory perspective and presents two qualitative studies conducted in European contexts. Through these studies, two contributions are developed. First, dominant sustainability concepts can support the legitimization of innovations while simultaneously risking premature framing that constrains entrepreneurial problem-solving. Second, entrepreneurs tackling large-scale challenges tend to embed scalability and affordability into their innovations from the outset, enabling them to operate alongside incumbents at meaningful scale. Together, these findings advance the understanding of how entrepreneurs aiming to achieve large-scale impact must balance developing viable material solutions with legitimizing them within existing industrial infrastructures, while seeking to move beyond the assumptions embedded in prevailing problem framings.