Research
Bypass, Repurpose, Weaken: a mechanism-based typology of the strategies a niche actor uses to engage an entrenched regime, classified by how each strategy acts on a specific lock-in barrier.
The full framework, with its academic grounding and a worked case study, in one document. Free to download, use, and cite.
Every niche technology arrives into a world already run by an incumbent regime: an aligned configuration of technologies, infrastructures, institutions, habits, and expectations that resists change. How a niche actor engages that regime, barrier by barrier, largely determines whether it succeeds and for whom.
The BRW framework is the Lab's way of reading that engagement. Unlike typologies that classify a strategy by its ambition relative to the regime as a whole, BRW classifies each strategy by its functional mechanism: what it actually does to a particular lock-in barrier. This shift in the unit of analysis, from the niche-regime relationship to the strategy-barrier relationship, is what makes the framework precise, because a single niche actor routinely deploys different mechanisms against different barriers within the same regime.
Bypass Construct a parallel system that performs the regime's function by other means, circumventing the incumbent rather than confronting it. Bypass requires capital and engineering capacity but minimises negotiation with incumbent actors. Mobile-money payment rails that route around bank branches are the canonical case.
Repurpose Redirect an existing regime element toward the niche's purpose, reorienting structure rather than replacing or avoiding it. Repurpose requires relational capacity and access to incumbent assets, and it draws on the institutional logics of layering and conversion. Placing charging at retail forecourts a rider already visits is a repurpose move.
Weaken Erode the foundations sustaining incumbent advantage through demonstration, advocacy, and the accumulation of small destabilising effects. Weaken requires communicative and political capacity rather than capital. Countering a misconception about a technology through visible, repeated proof is a weaken move.
The three are non-exclusive at the strategy level: a single intervention often combines mechanisms. Pay-as-you-go financing over mobile money, for instance, bypasses formal banking while repurposing mobile-money infrastructure. The typology classifies the dominant mechanism through which a strategy acts on a given barrier.
A typology of strategies is only useful alongside a typology of the barriers they engage. The framework characterises each lock-in barrier along four dimensions, plus a regime-level modifier:
The framework's central proposition is a strategy-barrier alignment: bypass matches hard, high-materiality, high-coordination barriers; weaken matches soft, low-materiality barriers; and repurpose occupies the intermediate ground where existing regime structure can be redirected. Misalignment predicts observable failure modes.
BRW turns a vague question, will this transition succeed?, into a precise, testable one: is each strategy in the portfolio aligned with the barrier it targets, and where is it misaligned? Because the framework is comparative and mechanism-based, it lets the Lab tell an innovator or funder which barriers they are actually engaging, whether their strategic mix fits, and where they are most likely to stall.
That cross-sector, mechanism-level reading is precisely the kind of insight a consortium cannot produce from inside a single deployment. It is one of the clearest reasons to bring the Lab in.
The BRW framework is developed in full, with its academic grounding and a worked case study, in the downloadable BRW Framework resource. It runs through the Lab's articles and case studies. To discuss how it applies to your work, see Contact.