Eco-innovation: Sensemaking and Strategic Responses to Institutional Uncertainty.

Drawing on neoinstitutional theory and extending effectuation theory, we show how the cognitive schemas of environmental entrepreneurs and other actors in the nascent aviation biofuels industry may both enable and impede eco-innovations. Based on the analysis of 381 public documents and interviews with 64 informants, we investigate how de novo firms, de alio firms, airlines, aircraft manufacturers, policy-makers, research institutes, and industry associations make sense of this new industry and respond to various institutional uncertainties. The data of this multiple case study indicate that industry optimists and pessimists exhibit systematic differences in norms and values, assumptions about future regulations, and risk cognitions. In addition, strategic postures may instantiate different entrepreneurial logics, which in turn result in differences in entrepreneurs' bricolage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]