Creating opportunities for institutional entrepreneurship: The Colonel and the Cup in English County Cricket

This paper examines how actors within a mature cultural field use their field positions to create opportunities for institutional entrepreneurship. Our analysis of the product innovation of a Knock-Out Cup in English County Cricket between the 1930s and 1960s shows that when the economic viability of a mature cultural field is threatened, actors learn to recursively create market and political opportunities for institutional entrepreneurship by deploying the resources of their field positions in tactics targeted at shifting product category boundaries. We find that ‘lone hero’ institutional entrepreneurs who experience failure from working in relative isolation learn to acquire new resources and deploy them in new tactics leading to a more collective approach, which is necessary for disrupting the institutional gatekeeping work that maintains a mature cultural field.