Building an infrastructure for the Innovation journey Seldom can an individual entrepreneur alone command the competence, resources, and legitimacy to develop and commercialize an innovation. Entrepreneurship is a collective achievement that resides not only within the parent organization of the innovation but also in the construction of an industrial infrastructure that facilitates and constrains innovation. This infrastructure includes (1) institutional arrangements to legitimize, regulate, and standardize a new technology; (2) public- resource endowments of basic scientific knowledge, financing mechanisms, and a pool of competent labor; (3) development of markets, consumer education, and demand; and (4) proprietary research and development, manufacturing, production, and distribution functions by private entrepreneurial firms to commercialize the innovation for profit. This chapter takes a macroperspective of the innovation journey and focuses on the issues and events involved in developing an industry infrastructure for innovation. In doing so, we make three contributions to managing the innovation journey: 1. We believe that understanding innovation is deficient if it focuses exclusively on the characteristics and behaviors of individual entrepreneurs and if it treats the social, economic, and political infrastructure for innovation as external factors that cannot be influenced. Popular folklore notwithstanding, the innovation journey is a collective achievement that requiries key roles from numerous entrepreneurs in both the public and private sectors. 2. Chapter 6 examines how this infrastructure emerges to commercialize technology and product innovations. This infrastructure emerges through the accretion of numerous institutional, resource, and proprietary events that influence each other over an extended period. Moreover, the very institutional arrangements and resource endowments created to facilitate industry emergence can hinder subsequent technological development and adaptation by proprietary firms. This generative process has a dynamic history that is important to study if we are to understand how novel forms of technologies, organizations, and institutions emerge. 3. We emphasize that the innovation journey is not limited to the for-profit sector; numerous entrepreneurial actors in the public and not-for-profit sectors play crucial roles. By studying the roles and how they interact to develop and commercialize a new technology we can understand how the risk, time, and cost to an individual entrepreneur are significantly influenced by developments in the overall industry. This study also explains why the entrepreneurial firms that run in packs are more successful than those that develop their innovations alone. The practical implications of this perspective emphasize that innovation managers must not only be concerned with microdevelopments of a proprietary technical device or product within their organization but also with the creation of a macroindustrial system that embodies the social, Andrew Van de Ven, Douglas Polley, Raghu Garud & Sankaran Venkataraman The Innovation Journey Oxford University Press, 2008