Integration of bricolage and institutional entrepreneurship for internet finance: Alibaba’s Yu’e Bao

This article describes how current research on the institutional entrepreneurship process tends to ‘design principles.’ There is lack of research on mechanism and strategy of the institutional bricolage, especially for Internet finance. Based on analysis of Yu’e Bao, the authors found that institutional entrepreneurs often use bricolage to form new institutions in organizational, material and discursive dimensions: organizational dimension which uses the attaching and bridging bricolage to achieve relational networks; material dimension which uses the simplifying and extending bricolage to acquire technical and economic basis; discursive dimension which uses the beautifying and analogy bricolage to theorize and institutionalize new practices. This article tries to explain and distinguish these three intertwined dimensions by using the case study. From the bricolage perspective, entrepreneurship behavior and institutional entrepreneurship behavior can be bridged. The emerging institutional entrepreneurship theory has been integrated with the bricolage theory for Internet finance.