Managing Disruptive Innovation: Entrepreneurial Strategies and Tournaments for Corporate Longevity

Extant research on disruptive innovation has implicitly incorporated entrepreneurship as the underlying driver of the disruptive phenomenon. We integrate recent developments from entrepreneurship and innovation research streams to better understand the conditions and causal mechanisms that influence disruptive innovation. Drawing on effectuation, evolutionary entrepreneurship, lead-users, collective intelligence, and opportunity tournament literature, we develop a theoretical framework that explains disruptive innovation as a co-evolutionary entrepreneurial process at the firm, product, and customer level. The framework offers a set of testable propositions to advance theory and practice in the field. We suggest avenues for future research and conclude entrepreneurial strategies to help general managers create and cope with disruptive innovation