ABSTRACT
Path creation often involves the development ofnew product markets and thus the concept of a market is fundamental to the study of evolutionary processes in organizational communities. When a new market is estab.. lished by novel and previously unknown products, social, cognitive, and economic processes are set in place that often culminate in buyers and sellers interacting around a dominant product design that establishes an ideal point of reference for products in the newly created market space (e.g., Utterback, 1996). When looked at in this light, path creation and market creation are often synonyms for the same underlying dynamic pro.. cesses that are involved in institutionalizing a transactional space within which product attributes, standards of evaluation, quality orderings, product identities, and terms of trade are widely known and taken for granted. But, what is the nature of these processes, and how do they com.. bine to create markets in real time?
