Anticipating Disruptive Innovation

Abstract

OVERVIEW:Organizations in today's hypercompetitive world face the paradoxical challenges of “dualism,” that is, functioning efficiently today while innovating effectively for tomorrow. Corporations, no matter how they are structured, must manage both sets of concerns simultaneously. To do this, organizations have to understand and learn to manage the dynamics of innovation that underlie both disruptive and sustaining innovations. Most analyses have been flawed by giving too little weight to the interactions between needs and technologies. Based on a dynamic model of these interactions, three distinct patterns of substitution are identified that illustrate how these two forces intersect.