The phenomenon of outsider-driven institutional entrepreneurship may appear both paradoxical and opaque. We examine outsider-driven institutional entrepreneurship by drawing on an in-depth qualitative case study of the emerging field of positive psychology education. We investigate how institutional entrepreneurs, located outside Kuwait’s Ministry of Education, enabled actors inside the Ministry both to deviate from existing institutional arrangements and to institutionalize new practices. Our findings illustrate that outsider-driven institutional entrepreneurship in emerging fields starts with ‘normalization’, that is, the production of claims, arguments, and evidence, about the effectiveness of the newly proposed practices. Our study contributes to the literature on outsider-driven institutional entrepreneurship in emerging fields by identifying a set of critical activities associated with deviation from prevailing institutional arrangements, and the institutionalization of innovation.

局外人驱动的机构创业现象可能看起来既矛盾又不透明。我们通过对积极心理学教育新兴领域的深入定性案例研究来检验局外人驱动的机构创业。我们调查了位于科威特教育部之外的机构企业家如何使教育部内部的参与者既偏离现有的制度安排，又使新的做法制度化。我们的研究结果表明，新兴领域的外来者驱动的机构创业始于“正常化”，即关于新提议实践的有效性的主张、论据和证据的产生。