ABSTRACT
The purpose of this book is to provide a conceptual framework of the combined actions of various groups of stakeholders to show how nanotechnology institutional emergence marked a rupture from previous forms of institutional emergence. Rather than focusing on a particular group of stakeholders—the institutional entrepreneurial “heroes”—the perspective chosen aims to provide evidence that institutional entrepreneurship is a complex process that resulted from a multifaceted web of interactions. It reveals that with the development of nanotechnologies, the process of institutional emergence was coevolutionary with that of industrial emergence, and that there was a constant interplay of reciprocal influence between the two. The PEN venture (Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies) offered an illustration of this phenomenon. Its inventory of nanoproducts reaching the market showed that products falling under the heading ‘health and fitness’ were by far the most numerous and constituted more than half of the nanoproducts in the inventory. In the absence of specific nanotechnology regulation, and in the context of all the uncertainties mentioned at various stages, the development and marketing of new products tended to favor those that were the most likely to be accepted by the general public because they were products intended to improve one’s health or to increase one’s well-being.
