Institutional life within an entrepreneurial region

Institutions are often regarded as static and unchanging, portrayed as constraints on innovation, entrepreneurship, and regional economic change. We propose an alternative perspective in order to understand how entrepreneurs experience and engage with institutions in ways that shape and help advance their collective interests. Motivated by our own research on regional entrepreneurial development, we theorize institutions as lived and interpreted experiences. We present institutional change as a creative and experimental response to emergent or competing logics. This conception of institutions has implications for how we theorize about economic transformation, recognizing that processes of institutional change are set in motion by endogenous attempts by economic actors to make sense of and act upon contradictory aspects of their varied institutional lives.