Markets are increasingly perceived as malleable systems constituted by actors that endogenously generate and shape the market. This view extends the traditional market view beyond the buyer-seller dyad and encompasses both directly market-related actors such as companies, suppliers, and buyers but also nonmarket actors such as regulators, lobbyists, journalists, activists, and the wider public. This alternative view has led to the emergence of market-shaping strategies, which refer to a focal company’s deliberate efforts to alter market characteristics, such as price levels or nonmarket elements, such as regulations, in its favor. Most descriptions of market-shaping strategies suggest that they influence both the market and nonmarket environments synergistically, and thus resemble the concept of an integrated strategy. However, given the systemic nature of markets, a company shaping a market may need to combine intended actions aimed at realizing the focal company’s market-shaping vision and emergent actions as response to emerging system dynamics. This implies that a market-shaping strategy may be constituted by different strategies with different but synergistic goals unified by the overarching goal of realizing the focal company’s market-shaping goal. In other words, a market-shaping strategy may be a strategy of strategies – a meta-strategy.  Moreover, previous research has indicated the significant potential of market-shaping strategies to improve the financial performance of companies as well as the overall market performance by increasing market size, market growth and value creation. However, despite this potential, the notion of market-shaping strategies has remained conceptually and empirically underdeveloped.   

This dissertation seeks to improve our understanding of market-shaping strategies by analyzing the constituent dimensions of market-shaping strategies and by presenting new empirical insights into how such strategies are employed. Hereby, two papers synthesize extant literature on market-shaping to analyze and conceptualize the underlying process of market-shaping strategies as well as a typology of distinct market-shaping strategies. The other two papers provide new empirical evidence concerning the employment of market-shaping strategies by investigating the influence of market-shaping roles and capabilities on the market-shaping efforts of a focal company.  

Drawing on the findings in the appended papers, this dissertation examines market-shaping strategies from the perspective of a market, nonmarket, integrated, and meta-strategy to reduce the concept’s theoretical and conceptual ambiguity and enhance our conceptual and empirical knowledge of how market-shaping strategies are construed and employed.   

This dissertation proposes market-shaping to be a meta-strategy of different integrated strategies focused on shaping both the market and nonmarket environment, while mitigating system dynamics and pursuing the overarching goal of shaping a market. This meta-strategic perspective provides a more nuanced and structured approach to understanding market-shaping strategies, reducing ambiguity, and emphasizing the interrelations between different environments and strategies. Through this structured approach, the interrelations between the different environments and strategies are emphasized, rendering dynamics and synergies between the two more comprehensible and highlighting the necessity for systemic strategies.  Thereby, this dissertation contributes to the literature on market shaping by providing a more detailed understanding of the nature and dimensions of market-shaping strategies, and how such strategies are employed by companies in practice. Through this effort, several theoretical and managerial implications are proposed as well as policy implications suggested that indicate a potential dark side of market-shaping strategies.    

Despite the promise and necessity of sustainable service ecosystems (SSE) to generate transformative value, many SSEs have failed to emerge or have struggled to survive. By investigating the design process of an SSE and the underlying factors that inhibit collaboration between its actors, this study answers calls to use the concept of actor engagement to further understand the dynamics of designing service ecosystems (Vink et al. 2021), as well as calls to further research sustainable services (Huang et al. 2021; Ostrom et al. 2021) and SSEs (Field et al. 2021). 

The main contribution lays in the expansion of the actor engagement concept by identifying five engagement constraints (i.e., institutional, economic, legal, political, and technological) that influence the level of engagement. In line with the systemic view of actor engagement (Brodie et al. 2019), the identified engagement constraints complement current actor engagement conceptualizations by providing systemic factors that influence the engagement behavior of actors. 

Secondly, we leverage service ecosystem design literature, and we identify two non-design related tensions in SSE design (coopetition, and personal commitment), and three design related tensions (related to the value proposition, business model, and governance of the SSE). Indeed, service ecosystem designers may encounter unexpected problems when sustainability becomes a central feature — our findings provide a first overview of tensions that occur in the design process of an SSE and that inhibit them from emerging and realizing sustainable/transformative outcomes.

Thirdly, we find indications that the interplay between engagement and tensions can be perceived as a recursive process, as an actor’s engagement can result in tensions, which in turn can influence their level of engagement. Thus, we provide further insights into the interdependencies and dynamics in SSE design processes (Patrício et al. 2018; Sangiorgi et al. 2017; Vink et al. 2021) and a theoretical understanding for disengagement processes(Chandler and Lusch 2015; Lehtinen et al. 2019)

Despite the emphasis on actors in the market-shaping literature, the market-shaping roles and heterogeneity of market actors have mostly been aggregated into overarching practices, processes, or activities. While market-shaping research has provided rich insights into the different activities, and actors, that play a role in shaping markets, it remains unclear how the differences in market actors market-shaping engagement translate back into specific roles. By following the Swedish market for liquefied gas over a period of three years, this longitudinal case study draws on extensive data to further elucidate market-shaping processes through the lens of roles. Employing an abductive theorizing approach, we empirically investigate the different roles performed by market actors in market-shaping processes. We discover that roles depend on the different levels in market-shaping engagement towards a focal market vision that ultimately relates to the disposition, behavior and influence displayed by the specific actors. Within this process we identify and delineate six market-shaping roles: the Market Driver, Market Supporter, Market Missionary, Market Rival, Market Catalyzer, and Market Detractor.

To date, market-shaping strategies have been mainly investigated from the lens of a focal market actor. Consequently, most insights have been about the activities and outcomes of the examined market-shaping strategy. However, research has indicated that situations in which multiple market actors have attempted to shape a market can result in the overshaping of a market. When a market is overshaped, it can be detrimental to the firm performance of all market participants. However, research into the notion of overshaping is limited. By employing a historical case study of the video game market in the 1980s, we investigate a market in which many firms attempted to shape the market to their benefit. We examine the effect of overshaping on a market and identify dynamics that resulted in the extreme case of overshaping. We contribute to the market-shaping literature by further cementing the concept of overshaping and prompt firms and policymakers to engage in market-shaping collaboratively. 

This paper analyzes how incumbent firms act to shape markets for new technology alternatives. It introduces a framework that highlights important linkages between the dynamic market-shaping capabilities of individual firms and market-shaping processes on a system level. The framework is used to analyze the endeavors of two large heavy vehicle manufacturers to introduce two technology platforms-electrified trucks and trucks fueled by liquefied gas-as alternatives to traditional diesel-fueled trucks. The analysis shows how incumbent firms deploy market-shaping capabilities to claim legitimate positions in envisioned future markets. The paper concludes by pointing to the dynamism of market interactions in sustainability transitions, showing how firms induce system-level reconfigurations and how such reconfigurations induce changes at the level of the firm.

This study explores the potential existence of reoccurring patterns in market-shaping processes by employing a qualitative meta-analysis to analyze 79 case studies on market-shaping. Through the evidence-based synthesis of qualitative data, we extract 20 generalized market-shaping activities that inform and form the foundation of a three-phased market-shaping process. This conceptual framework divides the market-shaping process into the phases of infusion, formation and retention. By applying our conceptual framework to the qualitative dataset, we explore the presence of market-shaping phases and provide further insights into the interdependences and dynamics between multiple, simultaneously occurring, market-shaping processes. By providing a structured market-shaping process, we attempt to reduce the overall complexity of the market-shaping phenomenon and facilitate the operationalization of the phenomenon for further market-shaping research. Additionally, our conceptualization provides practitioners with a framework to analyze the market-shaping efforts of other market actors and support the design of their own market-shaping strategies.

We identify four market-shaping strategies and their related activities that enable a focal market actor to work towards specific market outcomes. The conceptual framework provides firms with a tool for choosing specific market-shaping strategies depending on their market-shaping intention (offensive/defensive) and perception of a market's stability (stable/unstable). Accordingly, and in line with market-shaping literature, the four market-shaping strategies enable a firm to widen, reduce, maintain, or disrupt a market. Whereas previous market-strategy conceptualizations emphasized firm-level outcomes, the four identified market-shaping strategies focus on market outcomes and encompass a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of a firm's strategic actions on a market. Thereby, this study offers new perspectives on the implementation of market strategies in the context of markets as complex adaptive systems. By exemplifying the four market-shaping strategies using four industry cases, we illustrate how market-shaping strategies can appear in practice and demonstrate how firms can strategically leverage and steer market processes to their advantage.