| dc.description.abstract | Within innovation studies, progress has recently been made on how pathways for socio-technical transitions are enacted through struggles between actors. The focus has been on the enactment of ongoing transitions, initially set about by external factors. This thesis explores how transitions can be initiated, from the perspective of actor struggles, with a focus on incumbents. It aims to explore connections between enacted innovation activities before a transition has been initiated, and the subsequent transition pathways. Through studying a case where both incumbents and niche actors engage in innovation activities of a technology that is perceived as truly disruptive, different strategies for making the innovation competitive are explored. Blockchain technology within the financial sector is used as case. Based on a varied set of qualitative data, three separate analyses cover: a Multi-Level Perspective on the case context, the narratives of the actor-groups regarding the technology, and the technological solutions they develop. The analysis shows that the incumbents follow a 'fit-and-conform' pattern, aiming to reconfigure blockchain technology into a performance-enhancing substitute to existing technologies that fits regime structures. In contrast, the niche actor's employ a 'stretch-and-transform' pattern, maximising the technology's disruptive potential, aiming to decentralise power structures and even make banks obsolete. The study discusses what these patterns mean for the enactment of transition pathways. The findings that incumbents and niche actors employ different empowerment patterns, and that these patterns play different parts in the enactment of transition pathways, suggests that the engagement by incumbents in blockchain technology can have significant affects on the future trajectory of the regime. These findings are used to build an illustrated model for enacted transitions that integrates the transition pathways and the empowerment patterns. The model is explained and made to illustrate observed patterns in the case. The study concludes that incumbents under certain circumstances actively take part in development of disruptive technologies, which in this case leads to a less disruptive technology. This differs from the normal assumption that incumbents are locked-in and pathdependent, but corroborate with other recent findings in the transition literature (Smith, 2006; Geels et al., 2016). The implication is that lock-in and path dependency in incumbents can not be assumed, but should be determined through contextual analysis. | eng |