Organizational Ingenuity under Institutional Constraints in The Solar Industry

We seek to address two research questions: How do organizational actors display ingenuity in the face of severe institutional constraints, and how does this ingenuity affect the constraints? Triangulating data obtained from interviews, a focus group, and a media analysis we identify the major institutional constraints and demonstrated organizational ingenuity in the Ontario solar industry. We find two major constraints which lead to two main forms of ingenuity. Thus, as per our first research question we find that organizational ingenuity does indeed emerge from severe institutional constraints. Regarding the second research question, we find that the demonstrated ingenuity helps the industry to surmount one constraint, and believe the industry is now poised to surmount the remaining, and arguably more damaging, constraint. Ironically, the organizational ingenuity targeted one constraint and overcame the other. We also conclude that without legitimacy, which emerged from ingenuity, firms would continue to be limited by the constraints.