Sectoral innovation through competing logics: The case of antidepressants in traditional Chinese medicine

•We show sectoral dynamics with insights from an institutional logic perspective.•We show how competing logics stimulate changes of a sectoral innovation system.•We describe how agency is involved in a sectoral innovation system change.•We study TCM antidepressant sector, which has attracted little attention in the literature.

This paper studies the sectoral innovation of antidepressants in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) within the framework of logic competition between TCM and Western Medicine (WM). We find that with the entry of WM antidepressants the whole sector of TCM antidepressant is restructured. We argue that the coexistence of plural logics can stimulate sectoral innovation by injecting a new logic into each component of the innovation system. Existing sectoral actors innovate by referring to the competing logic to reinterpret their own logic and practice. In so doing they reshape sectoral practices and competitiveness.