Alternating Forms of Lock-in: Publishing Digital News in the Path of a Free Content Culture

The digitization of work and life has generated numerous market opportunities that remain untapped. The realization of strategic potentials of digitization is particularly difficult for path-dependent firms that are locked-in and perceive little scope of action to deviate from their established strategic patterns. In order to gain deeper insights into this phenomenon, we draw on qualitative data from the newspaper industry to explore how the scope of action evolves in lock-ins. We show that the scope of action continuously changes, as new market opportunities emerge and disappear. In particular, cognitive and normative barriers impede the realization of these strategic options until windows of opportunity close and the emergence of new market opportunities opens up new windows of opportunity that may be used to escape the established strategic pattern. Our research results provide several theoretical contributions, such as clarifying the role of digital technology for strategy development in lock-ins and providing empirical evidence for a continuously changing range of strategic options in lock-ins that alters the chances to break the path.