“Clean” Meat? Regulatory Entrepreneurship and Jurisdictional Contestation in a Nascent Industry

In nascent industries, uncertainty about which regulatory agency has jurisdiction is often a major challenge for pioneering ventures. Yet, much of the literature on new ventures’ nonmarket strategy takes for granted the existence of a designated regulator. How do ventures manage regulatory jurisdictional uncertainty? We conduct an inductive, multi-case research study on how entrepreneurial organizations pioneering the nascent cell-cultivated-meat industry navigated such uncertainty in the United States between 2015 and 2019. Drawing on extensive semi-structured interviews and archival data, we uncover stratagems and processes that organizations employ across three phases of regulatory jurisdictional uncertainty: jurisdictional void, contestation, and convergence. Our resulting theoretical framework distinguishes two overarching strategies— complementary and oppositional —and unpacks their underlying mechanisms, theorizing how they enable organizations to influence jurisdictional uncertainty. Our study uniquely elucidates the rich dynamics among the disparate actors that compose nascent technology-enabled industries: new ventures, nonprofits, incumbents, investors, and regulators. More broadly, it provides a fresh perspective on how entrepreneurial organizations shape the regulatory architecture of the industries they are striving to create.