How do multi-purpose technological innovation systems expand? Insights from carbon capture technology

• Framework for market formation in a multi-purpose technological innovation systems. • Highlights integration of new user sectors via formation of structural couplings. • Shows how market formation increases institutional complexity in a multi-sector TIS. • Shows the importance of shared narratives and framings for structural coupling. Multi-purpose technologies that interconnect and shape multiple sector transitions are central to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century. Yet we know little about how such technologies expand into new user sectors. This paper develops a framework for examining multi-purpose technological innovation system (TIS) expansion by extending the TIS value-chain approach. We conceptualize markets as cross-sectoral interfaces consisting of structural couplings—institutional, organizational, and technological—and theorize shifts in user sectors as the stepwise creation and stabilization of these interfaces. We apply the framework to a case study of the Norwegian carbon capture (CC) TIS, focusing on the shift from earlier applications toward new “hard-to-abate” sectors. We find that expansion began by reframing CC as a key solution for industrial decarbonization and by the emergence of shared cross-sector directionality that legitimized collaboration with new sectors. This enabled coupling work to proceed through government-backed projects, shared piloting and knowledge development tailored to new user constraints, and the rise of interface actors that reduced coordination and competence burdens. Through these coupling processes, both the CC-TIS and the new user sectors underwent structural change and became more aligned, mobilizing legitimacy, knowledge, capital, and early demand. The paper contributes a framework that links multi-purpose TIS growth to market formation as cross-sector interface building, refining understandings of market formation, institutional coherence, and life-cycle dynamics under heterogeneous demand.