Mobilizing a network to develop a field: Enriching the business actor's mobilization analysis toolkit

This paper tells the story of a thought experiment on deliberate network mobilization to advance radical innovation adoption in health care. The health care industry is said to experience a personalized medicine (PM) revolution, driven by simultaneous thrusts toward cost-effectiveness and new patient-value-centered advances in targeted treatment, digitization and preventive medicine enabling the personalization of care. Even though this revolution is almost unequivocally welcomed, adoption rates seem to disappoint. This paper seeks to explain the behavioral challenges faced by a business actor if it would take up the role of network mobilizer looking to develop the health care field – i.e. to impact the fundamental formal and informal institutions that structurate behavior – to accommodate this radical innovation. We enrich the strategic nets perspective on mobilization with stakeholder and social movement concepts into a framework to analytically tackle the behavioral challenges of mobilization. In a thought experiment with leading Belgian health care experts, we identify six voids remaining in this framework. Through a further abductive reflection on the information needs underlying these voids, we propose three new tools for mobilization analysis thereby contributing to a theory of network and field development from a business actor perspective.