Abstract

In many industries, incumbents face or are aware of the threat of disruption because of ongoing digital innovation. Disruption literature, prior to the late ’90s’, alluded to incumbents’ failure or success for reasons such as the technology deployed by the organisation. However, a few years after the first publication of Christensen’s theory on disruption (1995), researchers, including Christensen, began to attribute the success or failure of organisations to business models and not to technology per se. Thus, how organisations innovate their business models explain how they will fare in the market. A systematic literature review of the extant literature on disruption and business models, between 1997 and 2019 was conducted. The content analysis revealed three key relationships between disruption and business model innovation: (1) Entrants deploying disruptive business models, (2) Incumbents creating new business models, and (3) Incumbents adapting existing business models.

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