Disruptive innovation: Incumbent’s response to innovation threat

The theory of disruptive innovation has gained significant interest from the academic and business communities, investigating the reasons for inadequate or delayed responses of incumbents to innovation which challenges their established markets. Inadequate responses were explained by the concept of innovator’s dilemma, which postulates how incumbents tend to satisfy their consumers on the established markets, while overlooking opportunities with other consumers. However, the optimal incumbents’ response to disruptive innovation in the normative sense has not been researched. We investigate the choice of the payoff-maximizing strategy in response to the observed market disruption as a choice between different management approaches. Our study shows the importance of the speed of innovation adoption for the choice of the optimal response to innovation. We also show that the response can be delayed in some cases, reflecting the exploitation-exploration dilemma. This new insight complements the reasons of delayed response to disruptive innovation threats.