New organizations with range beat narrowly-focused incumbents every time
Incumbent organizations
Incumbent organizations tend to value sustaining innovations and do all the right things in management of their existing products, making them resistant to disruptive innovations. New, smaller organizations are better suited for disruptive innovations, especially if they are bringing new ideas and technologies from different domains and industries.
Scholars who support this view find that established firms tend to be good at improving what they have long been good at doing, and that entrant firms seem better suited for exploiting radically new technologies, often because they import the technology into one industry from another, where they had already developed and practiced it.[1]
See also:
- Innovation often occurs in the gaps between major domains
- Lateral thinking is range in action
- Financial structure and organizational culture constrain disruptive innovation
The Innovator’s Dilemma – Christensen (1997), ch. 2, 30. ↩︎