Exploring the Role of Managers in Nurturing Disruptive Innovations

Abstract

This paper presents a conceptual framework of managerial activities to foster disruptive innovations. Despite wide recognition of managerial role at middle and lower tiers of organization towards shaping its long-term strategy, the existing research, so far, has lacked in explicitly explaining the managerial activities directed towards the development of disruptive innovations. Authors explored the extant literature on disruptive innovation theory and identified three phases of the disruption process where managers at the middle and lower tiers can play an active role. The authors named this role of managers as their disruptive innovation activities (DIA). Furthermore, manager's DIA is explored in the context of existing antecedents of manager's strategic activities and a conceptual framework is proposed along with a resource map for future research, in this direction.

Managers' disruptive innovation activities: the construct, measurement and validity

“…Once DI is introduced, it needs to evolve to reach a certain performance threshold and provide a targeted value proposition to niche or unserved customers (Sandstr€ om et al, 2014;Sadiq and Hussain, 2018). This threshold is the minimum level of performance that is required to make the product/service acceptable to the customers in these segments (Sandstr€ om et al, 2014).…”

“…This threshold is the minimum level of performance that is required to make the product/service acceptable to the customers in these segments (Sandstr€ om et al, 2014). Here, managers need to strategically manage the efforts to shape and transform the customers' perception in favor of disregarded or unarticulated performance value offered by DI (Sadiq and Hussain, 2018). At this stage, the closeness of managers to the pulse of customers is the most important source for effective and timely decision-making (Lucas and Goh, 2009).…”

“…Hence, firms depend on their key human resource as a critical source of alternate discourse (Floyd and Wooldridge, 1997;Wooldridge et al, 2008). The pursuit of disruptive ideas at the individual level may result in the development of disruptive products/services at the firm level (Sadiq and Hussain, 2018). For example, the strategic exit of Intel in the 1980s is a classic case where individuals in the middle hierarchical levels initiated disruptive ideas that resulted in firmlevel strategic transformation (Burgelman, 1994;Sadiq and Hussain, 2018).…”

“…The pursuit of disruptive ideas at the individual level may result in the development of disruptive products/services at the firm level (Sadiq and Hussain, 2018). For example, the strategic exit of Intel in the 1980s is a classic case where individuals in the middle hierarchical levels initiated disruptive ideas that resulted in firmlevel strategic transformation (Burgelman, 1994;Sadiq and Hussain, 2018). Moreover, DIO is expected to be significantly associated with DIA but not with other constructs as it is specifically linked to the characteristics of DIA.…”

“…The literature, however, remains silent on what actions of managers support or stimulate the DI process. This gap in the knowledge base hinders literary efforts to link the wider network of factors with individual-level efforts and to analyze their DI outcomes (Sadiq and Hussain, 2018) i.e. the absence of a valid measure at individual level for DI prevents exploration of links between the actions of managers across the DI process.…”