Case study of the competitive behavior of companies in response to disruptive technologies in the dynamic environment of changing user needs

Abstract

Innovations are part of everyday reality in the business life of many companies. While for startups, success in business largely depends on success of innovations as they are trying to enter the market, for large monopolistic companies the influx of innovations is a crucial part of strategic decision-making. In a fast clockspeed high technology market, innovations are being introduced every day and have to be evaluated to identify potential threat to existing technology and market share of an incumbent. It is extremely difficult to understand if this new technology is something relevant to the market and will be adopted fast by customers, or it is merely one of many attempts, that will prove unsuccessful. Overarching questions for this work is "Why does the same technology become dominant in some cases while failing in others?" This work focuses on considering several real life examples with different outcomes through the lens of the Incumbent's Dilemma framework. The goal is to identify patterns of dynamics for several typical innovation scenarios and provide explanations that might be useful for product managers as well as top management of any company who want to understand how to use innovations to improve business performance and gain market share.