Institutional Bricolage: Building in the Gaps
In developed markets, entrepreneurs take certain things for granted.
Reliable payment systems. Enforceable contracts. Accurate market data. Logistics infrastructure that actually works. These institutional foundations are invisible until they’re absent.
In emerging markets, they’re frequently absent.
This creates a strategic question most architecture frameworks never consider: what do you build when the foundations don’t exist?
The Institutional Void Problem
Khanna and Palepu’s research on emerging markets identified what they call “institutional voids”—the absence of intermediary institutions that developed markets rely on:
Information voids: No reliable market research, credit ratings, or performance benchmarks.
Transaction voids: No dependable payment systems, escrow mechanisms, or contract enforcement.
Infrastructure voids: Unreliable power, patchy connectivity, fragmented logistics.
Regulatory voids: Unclear rules, inconsistent enforcement, bureaucratic unpredictability.
Traditional business architecture assumes these institutions exist. Standard operating models, technology stacks, and governance frameworks are designed for contexts where you can rely on external infrastructure.
When that assumption fails, so does the architecture.
Enter Bricolage
Bricolage is a concept from anthropology: making do with whatever is at hand. The French word literally means “tinkering” or “do-it-yourself.”
In entrepreneurship, bricolage means creatively combining available resources and mechanisms to construct functioning business models despite constraints. It’s improvisation elevated to strategy.
Institutional bricolage takes this further. It’s the deliberate hybridisation of formal and informal mechanisms to navigate institutional voids.
This isn’t just “making do.” It’s architectural design for environments where conventional approaches don’t work.
What Institutional Bricolage Looks Like
Consider how successful ventures in emerging markets actually operate:
Hybrid Payment Architectures
When formal payment rails are unreliable, ventures don’t simply accept the limitation. They architect around it.
Mobile money integration where banking infrastructure is weak. Agent networks for cash handling where digital adoption lags. Escrow mechanisms built into platforms to create trust where contract enforcement is uncertain.
The architecture formally incorporates informal mechanisms. It’s designed for the reality, not the ideal.
Information Void Navigation
Where market research doesn’t exist, platforms become sensing mechanisms.
Successful ventures treat their own transaction data as market intelligence. They build analytics capabilities that would be unnecessary in data-rich environments. Customer interactions become research infrastructure.
The architecture creates the information infrastructure that the institutional environment doesn’t provide.
Relationship-Based Governance
Where formal contracts are unenforceable, relationships become the governance mechanism.
This shows up in architecture choices: investment in partner management capabilities, embedded relationship touchpoints in operating processes, community-building features in platforms.
The informal relationship architecture does the work that formal institutions would do elsewhere.
The Strategic Choice
Institutional bricolage isn’t a temporary workaround. It’s a deliberate architectural strategy with distinct characteristics:
Necessity Bricolage is reactive, founder-dependent, and ad-hoc. It works in early stages but doesn’t scale. When the founder’s personal network is the payment system, you’ve hit a ceiling.
Strategic Bricolage is designed, systematic, and scalable. The hybrid formal-informal mechanisms are built into the architecture itself. They can be replicated across geographies and operated by teams, not just founders.
The difference is whether bricolage is a constraint to be escaped or a capability to be developed.
Architectural Implications
If you’re building in institutional void contexts, your architecture must:
1. Design for Hybrid Operations
Don’t architect for either formal or informal mechanisms exclusively. Design systems that orchestrate both.
A payment architecture might include: formal bank integrations AND mobile money integrations AND agent network management AND cash reconciliation workflows. All as first-class architectural components, not afterthoughts.
2. Build Your Own Infrastructure
Where external infrastructure is unreliable, architecture must internalise what would normally be external.
This means platform approaches: creating the marketplace where none exists, building the data infrastructure that institutions don’t provide, constructing the trust mechanisms that legal systems don’t enforce.
3. Embed Sensing in Operations
When you can’t rely on external information sources, operations must generate intelligence.
Architecture the organisation so that customer-facing activities systematically produce market insights. Every transaction becomes a data point. Every partner interaction becomes a sensing opportunity.
4. Modularise for Context Variation
Institutional conditions vary dramatically across markets, even within the same country.
Modular architectures that allow different institutional navigation mechanisms in different contexts will scale better than monolithic designs that assume uniform conditions.
The Counterintuitive Advantage
Here’s what most people miss: institutional bricolage isn’t just a way to cope with constraints. It can become a competitive advantage.
Ventures that develop sophisticated bricolage capabilities can operate in markets that more conventional competitors can’t enter. They can serve customer segments that formal-only approaches can’t reach. They can build resilience that pristine architectures lack.
The capability to navigate institutional voids—once developed—becomes a dynamic capability in itself.
The Bottom Line
In emerging markets, the question isn’t whether to engage in bricolage. Everyone does. The question is whether your bricolage is ad-hoc survival or deliberate architecture.
Strategic bricolage—the intentional design of hybrid formal-informal systems—isn’t a failure of development. It’s a sophisticated response to complex environments.
The ventures that scale in institutional void contexts don’t wait for institutions to develop. They architect around the gaps.
That’s not making do. That’s making it work.