New CO₂ utilization ventures encounter various commercialization barriers in their external environment (cf. Table 2). This environment is mainly determined by investors, future employees, partners in R&D and manufacturing, competitors, customers, governments, and society.

Barriers when dealing with investors in the field of CO₂ utilization fall within investment behavior, requirements dilemma, operational and strategic involvement, and in access to investments. The risk taking of investors is not much different to other hardware-based technology investments. However, uncertainties in regulations, the preference for asset-backed investments, and the fact that there is often yet no market with a minimum assurance were reported to discourage the risk affinity for CO₂ utilization further. In addition, study participants stated that the clean tech sector still suffers from a loss of reputation due to investment decisions during the mid-2000s: institutional investors without suitable sector-specific experience invested heavily into clean energy technologies (e.g., Rai et al., 2015) contributing to poor financial returns between 2000 and 2010 (e.g., Bygrave et al., 2014).

These experiences led to a set of requirements that put new technology ventures to the test. A proof-of-concept on an industrial scale (actual system prototype or proven technology in its final form) is often mandatory and existing agreements with off-takers/customers are required as described by the interviewees.

Moreover, the degree of an investor’s involvement can result in a trade-off decision: the investor may bring crucial market and management expertise but might also curtail the new venture’s freedom and fail to acknowledge its expertise as reported differently by the study participants. Either way, the interviewees highlighted that institutional investors are necessary to scale-up and grow. Hence, access to these investments were noted to be of upmost importance and new CO₂ utilization ventures stated to often lack the network to gain that investment access.

Barriers in the context of future employees are competitive job markets and the staffing process. Job markets like any other market are influenced by world economics. Especially the oil market developments pre and post the 2000s were pointed out to have shaped the availability of technical personal in the USA and also in Europe. In general, the risk affinity of future employees and thereby the willingness to work in a firm with a high probability to fail is claimed to be low. New CO₂ utilization ventures also began to strategize and move to certain locations to get access to greater talent pools. Close ties to university can facilitate the staffing process. However, there is also a trade-off between proximity for partnerships and recruitment. Overall, fluctuation in the management, and the internal development of necessary skillsets and the organizational fit of future employees were described to remain challenging.

Additional barriers related to external stakeholders concern partners in R&D and manufacturing. The partner’s alignment with new CO₂ utilization ventures emerges as a barrier, when it comes to the strategy for a technology development that takes at least 3–5 years and the motivation that depends on the position within the value chain. Furthermore, there are proclaimed challenges in collaboration and resource sharing (knowledge transfer and infrastructure). New CO₂ utilization ventures need to assess and identify potential partnerships to engage in a collaboration. The roles of partner, however, are not necessarily easy to define, the coordination of partnerships is resource intensive and the matchmaking process requires the presence of extensive networks as described by the interviewee. Nevertheless, outsourcing strategies and approaches to build entire synergetic ecosystems with crucial value chain stakeholders involved were identified as attempts to overcome shortcomings in resources. Knowledge transfer—by means of market and industry intelligence, and management expertise—and the provision of infrastructure, offer opportunities for building up intellectual property (IP) portfolios and testing capabilities under real life conditions, but were recognized as very challenging to establish.

The competitor category reveals market entry barriers in form of lock out, subsidization and scale effects. New CO₂ utilization ventures claim to face threats of being locked out of the market by competitors temporarily lowering prices for commoditized products. Such entry deterrence strategies of large incumbents in high volume markets with little product margins are reported to require significant price advantages of new technology ventures over current prices to be competitive. Furthermore, inconsistencies within the subsidization of renewable energy or fossil fuels directly influence competing technologies when certain technologies are favored (e.g., Victor, 2009; Hope et al., 2015) or exemptions for certain companies are made [e.g., the special equalization scheme under the renewable energy sources act in Germany (§§ 63 ff. Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz—EEG 2017)]. Aside from these subsidies, scale effects cater for low costs of mature technologies such as fossil-based productions as described by the interviewees.

During the interaction with customers new CO₂ utilization ventures encounter barriers regarding a proof-of-concept, the participation of potential customers, specific customer characteristics, and global market dynamics. A proof-of-concept in form of a pilot production facility with a high quality of product samples is mandatory for most potential customers to sign any kind of offtake agreement; this in turn is often necessary for investors as recurrently pointed out by the study participants. However, risk profiles of customers are reported to vary depending on the position within the value chain (e.g., 1/10 of scale for several months vs. full scale for several years). Moreover, new CO₂ utilization ventures can share customers’ risks by issue commissioning warranties. A financial challenge yet remains: either as a proof-of-concept or as the backing of warranties. Furthermore, customer’s problems need to be acknowledged and the solutions need to be understood from both, the customer and the new CO₂ utilization venture as pointed out by the participants. To do so, an early participation and specific customer characteristics are identified drivers that must be addressed. New CO₂ utilization ventures have experienced challenges in complying with industry requirements such as ownership models, investment abilities, and customers’ intrinsic motivations to lower the environmental impact. Policy intervention and market dynamics were described to further influence these specific characteristics and to be potential barriers in themselves. Overall there is little perceived willingness to pay a premium for environmentally and socially superior products in the field of CO₂ utilization: Only one out of 14 interviewees sees a general willingness to pay a premium for carbon-based products; one interviewee does not know and 12 interviewee see no or very limited willingness of a small fraction of customers to pay premium prices.

Further barriers that are related to governments are in the categories competences, regulation, and other incentives. In terms of competences, the study participants claim that there is a lack of foresight and most regulation is based on current rather than novel technologies. Moreover, responsibilities are often not clearly defined and passed on between different authorities (e.g., between the different Directorate-Generals of the European Union). With respect to regulatory frameworks translation, harmonization, and sovereignty is often an issue for rolling-out CO₂ utilization technologies globally. Regulation frameworks are perceived as too complex, volatile, and can even create market perversion, e.g., by encouraging the generation of more and more energy rather than focusing on a more efficient use (e.g., via storage). The barriers for funding applications are noted to be considerable for small companies and thereby limit the funding access. Other incentives like a general sponsorship for the implementation of CO₂ utilization technologies are underrepresented and long-term strategies and global agendas for CO₂ utilization were identified as still missing by the interviewees.

When it comes to society, the main barrier is public perception and acceptance. There is a perceived negative misconception of CO₂, especially when new CO₂ utilization ventures are connected to the emitting industries. Dedicated marketing strategies and education programmes are identified as widely missing.

New CO₂ utilization ventures experience also barriers within their organization (cf. Table 3). These barrier categories range from size and structure over strategy to resources. Like other new technology ventures, CO₂ utilization ventures encounter challenges because of their size. The competitiveness is affected by capabilities to compete on market prices and even below-market (dumping) prices as reported by the study participants. Moreover, scale effects such as the fossil industry built up over decades, complex regulatory framework, and limitations to take on multiple roles simultaneously such as investor, owner, manufacturer, and operator influence the perceived competitiveness even further. The internal structure of new CO₂ utilization ventures greatly influence the decision making of investors. An understanding of the investment rationale is noted to enhance the chances of survival and future growth.

Strategy-related barriers relate to market characteristics, value creation, IP protection, and project financing. The market entry strategy must meet the specific market requirements and characteristics. Hence, a focus on the technological application is observed to be necessary. Opportunities may arise when focusing on bridging applications to decarbonize the transportation sector or to store energy. New CO₂ utilization ventures need to target customers that are at a particular stage in the value chain, even though their technology can have different outlets for different value chain positions. Moreover, they need to balance relevance in R&D and marketability of their technology and need to decide on how much value they want to capture and how to acknowledge and build on the existing competencies of their potential customers as reported by the interviewees. When approaching a customer, study participants noted that challenges regarding the IP arise. A rigid patenting strategy might help to facilitate immediate interaction, but is also very capital intensive as pointed out by the interviewees. Having a sound strategy to finance and to implement collaborative projects holds further perceived hurdles that may be driven by staged project approaches.

Internal barriers in the resource domain are grouped into knowledge and networks, management and team, infrastructure, finance, and technology. New CO₂ utilization ventures encounter challenges to obtain certain expertise such as management and market expertise, and application know-how. They often report to lack access to networks to build-up knowledge and approach key persons for innovation processes in external organizations, so-called gatekeepers (Allen, 1970). Within the management and team category, capabilities such as adaptation abilities for dynamic team settings and changing environments and the management composition were reported by the study participants to hinder successful commercialization.

Furthermore, infrastructure availability and dependence on existing infrastructure cause perceived internal challenges. In this regard, modifying existing equipment or using external facilities to rapidly deploy new technologies was described as greatly beneficial. However, compliance requirements from customers to build-up R&D facilities internally and the access to external infrastructure hinders the development of new CO₂ utilization ventures. Moreover, centralized production systems with established infrastructure and the upkeep of an influx of required inputs such as CO₂ and energy apply further pressure on these ventures.

Financial barriers are reflected by costs, pricing, and funding. The capital costs for proofs-of-concepts and other testing actions are noticed as very high in the field of CO₂ utilization. In addition, new CO₂ utilization ventures report to be often incapable of either scaling down at capital expenditure rates that would enable technological applications (see economies of scale) or building the facilities large enough to make the capital expenditure feasible, because raw materials are not available in sufficient quantities. Furthermore, their pricing capabilities are limited and they are unable to compete on under-market (dumping) prices. Funding opportunities and cost or availability of inputs such as CO₂ and energy were stated to vary from one geographic location to another (see also Hendriks et al., 2013). Moreover, it is the experience of CO₂ utilization ventures that the availability of funding sources is limited and that the exploitation of these sources is also challenging in terms of administration.

The last categories of internal barriers are of technological nature. They are related to application, feasibility, up-scaling, performance and technology development. Some new CO₂ utilization ventures in the sample use platform technologies and therefore have a broad range of possible technological applications. This application range was identified by interviewees to bring challenges; research expertise and experience often determine the focus on an initial product rather than marketability or other market drivers. The study participants observed that new CO₂ utilization ventures need to focus on a market driven applications whilst ensuring a maximized flexibility to adapt to different CO₂ sources such as diluted or concentrated and large or small CO₂ sources. Furthermore, when showing the feasibility of their CO₂-based products and processes they must comply with time and resource-intensive testing and sampling requirements (e.g., life-cycle assessments, large simulations or pretests under real life conditions) of potential customers. Moreover, to get to a so-called proof-of-concept new CO₂ utilization ventures have to up-scale their lab-scale processes over demonstrators to pilot plants. In the light of experiences from the participants, this up-scaling requires extensive engineering expertise and necessary capital.

A poor performance of CO₂-based products can hinder a successful commercialization as well. Industry requirements such as the reported high level of reliability of power plant operations must be acknowledged. The willingness to pay a premium for CO₂-based products was highlighted as very limited, hence, the interviewees conveyed product performance needs to be superior to be competitive. Developing CO₂-based products takes time, especially when involving other stakeholders in the development process, coordination, and feedback loops (e.g., external evaluation rounds). These stages were reported to be time consuming and very challenging.

The third main category of the identified barriers is referred to as cross-linkage barriers (cf. Table 4). Barriers in this category can relate to both, internal and external barriers. They are re-occurring connecting elements within the commercialization process and are grouped into three sub-categories: location, risk, and promoter.

New CO₂ utilization ventures face various challenges in terms of the geographic location. The location does not only determine incentives and des-incentives such as regional or national regulation and funding opportunities, but it also feeds into the requirements for partnerships: the proximity to portfolio venture, the possibilities for joint ventures, and the existence of markets for a potential exit depend on the location of a collaboration as study participants have reported.

When it comes to risk, the barriers are ownership and world economics. Owning capital-intensive assets is described to be too risky for most new CO₂ utilization ventures, whereas the interviewees stated large industry players often own too many assets to take risks. Furthermore, the perceived risk averseness of their potential customers (and investors) can corner them into additional risk taking via warranty agreements. Global market developments and dynamics such as the economic crisis and the shift of the energy sector toward decentralized energy production were found to create further uncertainties and hinder long time commitments of several stakeholders.

Promoters are individuals that actively and intensively support the innovation process (cf. Witte, 1973) and thus are playing an important role in the commercialization process of CO₂ utilization. However, they are most of the times noted to be absent and identifying and convincing gatekeepers at any stakeholder organization was recognized as considerably challenging. New CO₂ utilization ventures reported that they face multiple organizational levels approaching large companies and find it difficult to identify key contacts. Hence, not only the identification but also the advocacy for a collaboration represent main barriers for these ventures. However, promoters for CO₂ utilization do already exit internally within the founding and management teams of new technology ventures and externally among investors, partners and governments. Examples of this highlighted by the study participants include:

Founders of new CO₂ utilization ventures can have proven entrepreneurial skillsets and vast industry knowledge and networks from previous work experiences to enable the access to investors and potential customers and partner. Moreover, they cannot only bring specific know-how, but also have intrinsic sustainability-oriented motivation from previous experiences and see CO₂ as (market) opportunity.

The study results do not only identify the internal, external and cross-linkage barriers of new CO₂ utilization ventures, but also indicate the (perceived) relevance of the barrier categories. Cross-barrier relations were discovered first, by triangulating the reported barriers of new CO₂ utilization ventures with the reported barriers of the four industry players (steel producer, utility, infrastructure provider, and chemical company). Second, by comparing two geographic location, representing two different institutional settings: Canada, the USA, and the EEA. Third, by considering ties between internal, external, and cross-linkage barriers. Fourth, by having four categories of success factor (Song et al., 2008) ranked by the new CO₂ utilization ventures. Lastly, by comparing the sample on an application class level.

Barriers in the categories customer, partner, technology, government, finance, infrastructure, and strategy were reported the most by both new technology ventures and large incumbents, whereas there was less reporting in the categories society, risk, and knowledge and network. Differences were mainly in the categories investor and competitor, and promoter and team and management. The industry players reported more barriers in the first two categories, while the new ventures reported more in the latter two. Figure 4 gives a graphical overview of this data triangulation by plotting the relative reported barrier categories of the industry players against the relative reported barrier categories of new ventures.

Comparing the two regions, the reported barrier categories are primarily similar. However, the categories risk and society were more often reported in the EAA and the categories team and management, investor, competitor, knowledge and network and future employee more often in Canada and the USA (cf. Figure 5). Figure 5 shows the relative reported barrier categories with regard to the two observed regions. Categories that are closer to the ordinate (EEA) than to the abscissa (Canada and the USA) indicate a higher importance/relevance in the EEA and vice versa. The closer a category is to the bisector, the less distinct its importance/relevance for one region is.

The amount of cross-barrier relationships between the three main categories are also depicted in Figures 4 and 5. The external categories customer, investor, government, partner; the internal categories strategy and all resource subcategories; and the cross-linkage categories promoter and location have the most links with ties to more than 50% of the other main categories.

The emphasis on main barriers has been captured by coding terms such as “challenge,” “hurdle,” “issue,” “barrier,” or “problematic” in combination with “main,” “biggest,” or “most.” These perceived main barriers are in the categories partner, customer, investor, government, society, promoter, location, finance, and technology (cf. Tables 2–4). Moreover, the perceived main barrier categories cover those barrier categories that have been reported by all new CO₂ utilization ventures in the sample and include those barrier categories that have the most cross-barrier relationships (cf. Figures 4 and 5). However, the perceived main barrier category society is only reported by the minority of new CO₂ utilization ventures in the sample and has little relationships to other barrier categories.

Figure 6 reveals the ranking of success factor categories. Thus, market and opportunity are the highest ranked categories followed by team, resources, and strategic and organizational fit. The ranking slightly changes when breaking it down to the two geographic locations. For Canada and the USA, the entrepreneurial opportunity is on the same rank as entrepreneurial team.

Other comparisons can be made between the different application classes. For this matter the application class CO₂ to fuels was further broken down, when a new CO₂ utilization venture aimed at technological outlets in CO₂ to fuels and CO₂ to chemicals. These ventures often pursue platform technologies that allow for the conversion of CO₂ to synthetic fuels and other more complex chemicals such as pharmaceuticals. Table 5 shows differences and relations of technology readiness level (TRL) and application classes. CO₂ mineralization has the highest technological maturity, on average, followed by CO₂ to fuels, and CO₂ to chemicals.

Pursuing multiple application classes CO₂ to fuels and CO₂ to chemicals seem to impact the TRL. In most of these cases the venture has not decided on a business model or initial product yet. This is also depicted in the lowest averaged venture age of 4.8 years in this application class.

On average, the CO₂ mineralization class has the highest TRL but less capital has been attracted and fewer employees are working in this field than in the CO₂ to fuels class.

Overall, the evaluation via various comparisons of the observed barrier phenomena remains challenging because of the qualitative nature of this study. However, the results at least indicate different levels of relevance. Figures 4–6 and Table 5 thereby provide an effective way to highlight these indications.

The capital intensity is paramount in CO₂ utilization technologies. New CO₂ utilization ventures need to proof their technology in costly demonstrators and pilot plants. Shared infrastructure and cost-efficient business models have been recognized to be of help in overcoming capital challenges for these kind of technologies (Cleantech Incubation Europe, 2014). New CO₂ utilization ventures that invest primarily in people and not in bricks may be better able to adapt an organizational structure that comply with conventional requirements of institutional investor such as investment volumes.

Furthermore, there is a need for an immediate collaboration to enhance knowledge transfer and facilitate learning for new CO₂ utilization ventures. Regional collaborative alliances with multiple stakeholder alongside the CO₂ value chain from CO₂ emission, capture, and utilization to the consumption of CO₂-based products are wanted. Entire partnership systems could bring together (local) stakeholder to create specific business opportunities for CO₂ utilization.

However, new CO₂ utilization ventures also seem to lack the effective coordination of these approaches. Intermediating third parties (cf. van Lente et al., 2003; Altenburg and Pegels, 2012; Kivimaa, 2014) could ensure motivational and strategic alignment of different partners and coordinate the collaboration. Furthermore, these parties could help to overcome the (causality) dilemma where both, potential off-taker and investor, require a proof-of-concept and existing contracts by mediating between the different actors.

New CO₂ utilization ventures face challenges when approaching conservative industries with radical solutions. The potentially disruptive nature of these solutions (Christensen, 1997) may be the reason for a restraining behavior of customers, investors, and other partners (cf. Gauthier and Gilomen, 2016).

Large incumbents do not only hesitate when developing sustainability-oriented solutions themselves (cf. Ihlen and Roper, 2014), but also are often reluctant to establish new facilities for a CO₂-based production. Building-up a new production can be disruptive for established companies, whereas retrofitting an existing production line is rather sustaining for them.

These different innovation natures may also be represented in the sample: an application class with a higher TRL and, at the same time, fewer capital attracted than another class could indicate that, e.g., capital efficient retrofitting approaches are more prominent in the first class (cf. Table 5: CO₂ mineralization vs. CO₂ to fuels). However, differences in TRL, attracted capital and number of employees could also be explained by different technology requirements (e.g., exothermic vs. endothermic) or market conditions (e.g., resource availability).

Beside the disruptive or sustaining nature, the degree of the sustainability-orientation of an innovation seems to influence the commercial success of new CO₂ utilization ventures. Hockerts and Wüstenhagen (2010) identified two dimensions of entrepreneurial activity that can lead to a sustainability transition of an industry: environmental and social performance, and market share. Hörisch (2015) builds on these dimensions and argues that sustainability-oriented new technology ventures need to master a coordinated interplay between sustainability effect and market impact to meaningfully contribute to sustainability transitions.

However, the findings of this study show that these dimensions tend to have a negative effect upon each other. An optimum CO₂ reduction is often not economically viable and market impact is achieved at the expense of the sustainability effect.

Consequently, new CO₂ utilization ventures need to initially focus on the product’s performance (economic value creation) rather than on its sole sustainability aspect (ecological and social value creation) to successfully commercialize their products in competitive mass markets. This focus may diminish the strong sustainability-orientation by emphasizing innovation which does not have sustainability as a primary target, but even products or materials with very high sustainability effect could be positioned as more durable, robust, or cheaper (cf. Driessen et al., 2013) to attain greater market impact.

Nevertheless, staged approaches such as a staged market entry strategy (cf. Clay, 2013) could help to target niche markets with a high sustainability effect and move toward mass markets with increased economies of scale and knowledge about industry requirements. Trade-offs between sustainability dimensions may thereby be avoided.

However, some technologies cannot be economically viable on a niche-market scale. That is why an early application focus in consideration of the market circumstances is crucial. Platform technologies with various application options might help to diversify and dynamically adapt to new market developments, but the choice often overburdens new CO₂ utilization ventures. Staged project strategies can help to generate initial revenue and get a better understanding of customers by starting with advisory projects on a potential CO₂ utilization implementation.

The acknowledgment of regulatory systems and institutional settings are essential for CO₂ utilization and shape support systems for entrepreneurship (Fichter et al., 2013). In this work two geographic regions with different institutional settings have been looked at: Canada and the USA and the EEA. However, there were more similarities than differences. Whereas risk averseness and societal acceptance seemed to play a bigger role in the EEA, institutional investors, human capital and knowledge transfer seemed to be more prominent in Canada and the USA.

The public perception of CO₂ utilization influence new technology ventures. Even though only the minority of the new CO₂ utilization ventures reported barriers in the society category, social acceptance has been recognized as a necessity for a successful commercialization of SOI such as CO₂ utilization (Jones et al., 2017). Dedicated marketing strategies enable these ventures to counteract the misperception of CO₂ utilization, especially in the EEA (cf. van Heek et al., 2017).

Policy interventions and regulatory pressure might be another way to overcome barriers (Jaffe and Palmer, 1997; Brunnermeier and Cohen, 2003; Parker et al., 2009; Kneller and Manderson, 2012) but represent dependency on rather short-term mechanism. Interventions such as feed-in tariffs for renewable energy technologies affect institutional investors in clean technologies (cf. Bürer and Wüstenhagen, 2009; Ghosh and Nanda, 2010). Due to the larger number of private investments in the clean technology sector in Canada and the USA than in the EEA, a different importance of institutional investors might be attributed to the two institutional settings.

CO₂-based products can substitute fossil-based products, however, the technologies for the substitution are often not yet economically viable without evolving production systems or new regulations (Bocken et al., 2014). Some of these CO₂ utilization technologies currently need excess energy from renewable energy production. This dependency of current inefficiencies in the distribution systems of renewable energies can lead to a shorten vision as interim solutions.

However, clear responsibilities within existing regulatory frameworks and less complexity could already reduce barriers regardless of the institutional setting and the time horizon.

The cross-linkage barrier categories of promoter and location especially stress the relevance of context and mediation for new CO₂ utilization ventures.

Not only proximity aspects when dealing with external stakeholders (for investments: cf. Knight, 2012; for partnerships: cf. Hansen, 2014) and location-dependent (des-)incentives, but also the technological diversity within CO₂ utilization call for a dynamic adoption to the specific needs of a new CO₂ utilization venture. Hence, tailored support solutions for individual technological and geographic context are needed (see also Fichter et al., 2016).

The promoter model is a recognized concept to overcome innovation barriers (Gemünden et al., 2007). In this work, gatekeepers are key people in any commercialization process of an external organization whereas promoters are key to drive a specific innovation on different levels (Hauschildt and Schewe, 2000).

With regard to the four person promoter model (Gemünden et al., 2007), the identified promoters in CO₂ utilization are mainly power and expert promoters. Process and relationship promoters remain mainly unidentified or are missing. This is especially reflected in the challenge to identify and engage with gatekeepers outside the new CO₂ utilization venture’s organization.

An intermediating third party could step in to facilitate the matching process and act as relationship promoter (ibid).

The population size was determined by the fact that CO₂ utilization is a relatively new and emerging field. The population of new CO₂ utilization ventures was identified with little under 50 worldwide and the companies within the sample are on average 6.5 years old (cf. Table 5). The sample size made a full comparison of the application classes challenging and led to a lack of contrasting juxtaposition within the classes.

Additionally, comparisons between different conversion processes such as catalysis, artificial photosynthesis, photocatalysis, and electrochemical reduction (cf. Styring and Jansen, 2011) for the same product and different sustainable business models such as create value from waste or substitute with renewables and natural processes (cf. Bocken et al., 2014) are missing.

Comparisons of top management and operating staff within a single new CO₂ utilization venture to view the phenomena from different perspectives (Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007) were rarely performed, because of the limited amount of knowledgeable people (cf. Palinkas et al., 2015) for this study. From the 23 interviewees, nine had not been with the company since its start, accounting for an average of being 4.8 years with the venture (cf. Table 5). Therefore, internal barriers have been aggregated to the organizational level only.

Although theoretical saturation was reached in the course of this analysis, future research should look at sustainability-oriented organizations in their growth phase in-depth to identify differences in the individual, group and organizational level (cf. Hueske and Guenther, 2015). Such an in-depth analysis could also enrich data on the social dimension of sustainability, that is currently underrepresented due to the predominant focus on the technology development of most of the investigated new technology ventures.

In addition, qualitative comparisons could shed light on the differences in location and output- and process-based categorizations of new CO₂ utilization ventures and longitudinal studies on sustainability-oriented ventures could contribute to a better understanding of success and failure factors of strong sustainability-oriented new technology ventures.

Furthermore, case studies on system intermediaries for the sustainability transition and their role in supporting these new ventures could help to further shape effective support mechanism.

This work brings together SE, sustainability transition and barriers to successful commercialize radical SOI. These radical SOI show increased complexity when compared to conventional innovation. Multidimensional (economic, environment, and social) focal points such as the coordinated interplay of sustainability effect and market impact (cf. Hörisch, 2015) or the problem of “double externalities” (cf. Beise and Rennings, 2005) and an extended external orientation toward more diverse stakeholders (including society or partnership ecosystems), e.g., to overcome resource constraints, to bring novel technology to the market or to share risks (cf. Jay and Gerard, 2015) differentiate the commercialization process of strong sustainability-oriented new technology ventures from conventional new technology ventures. Hence, this study supports the notion of describing radical SOI processes by adding sustainability-specific characteristics to conventional innovation processes (cf. Walker et al., 2008; Driessen et al., 2013; Jay and Gerard, 2015).

An internal and external barrier framework (Hueske and Guenther, 2015) has been applied and further developed for strong sustainability-oriented new technology ventures based on a qualitative interview study with 24 new ventures and large incumbents in CO₂ utilization. A new cross-linkage barrier category has been added to the main barrier categories to highlight the relevance of connections between internal and external barriers. This category contributes to a better understanding of the importance of context for strong SOI such as CO₂ utilization.

Stakeholder synergies and the creation of shared values (cf. Tantalo and Priem, 2016) are experienced throughout the barrier analysis but especially in the partner category where entire stakeholder ecosystems drive the successful commercialization of CO₂ utilization. Hence, stakeholder synergies (Tantalo and Priem, 2016) rather than stakeholder theory (Freeman et al., 2007, 2010) could be supported by strong sustainability-oriented new technology ventures for external barriers.

Value-creating strategies through collaboration also occur internally with external interactions (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000). Organizational learning (cf. Teece et al., 1997) is represented foremost as driver in expertise gain in the knowledge and network category. Thus, dynamic capabilities seem appropriate for internal barriers of strong sustainability-oriented new technology ventures.

Both, synergies and learnings can be facilitated by cross-linking promoters that can reveal gatekeepers and mediate between stakeholder groups (cf. Hauschildt and Schewe, 2000). In combination with the proximity dimension (Knight, 2012; Hansen, 2014) these intermediaries can lay the groundwork for local new venture support systems paving the way for multilevel perspectives on the entire system of strong SOI such as CO₂ utilization (cf. Geels, 2011).

Recommendations for a dedicated support system are derived from a commercial barrier analysis of new CO₂ utilization ventures in the institutional settings of Canada and the USA, and the EEA. There are four levels of recommendations for strong sustainability-oriented new technology ventures, policy makers, and support providers: on (a) actors, (b) resources, (c) institutional settings, and (d) the coordination of a support system.

Strong sustainability-oriented new technology ventures and other actors from the entire value adding path of CO₂ utilization (e.g., from CO₂ and energy supplier, R&D and upscaling partners to off-taker/customers) should take part in partnership ecosystems that are aligned and facilitated by intermediating third parties to exploit synergies such as increased value capture and knowledge transfer. Policy makers can encourage these ecosystems by providing necessary resources and means to pursue fruitful collaborations.