How incumbents respond to the threat of disruptive innovation: an organisational resilience perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT Organisational resilience is a crucial ability to help enterprises overcome crises. However, little attention has been paid to how incumbents form organisational resilience to achieve sustainable development under the impact of disruptive innovation. This paper takes Fujifilm's anti-disruption management practice as a case sample. It adopts an inductive single-case methodology to explore the formation process of organisational resilience in incumbents. The results show that: (1) the development of the incumbent firm is reborn through the stages of recovery, rebound, and surpass. (2) at each stage of the growth of the incumbent firm, it adopts proactive strategic changes and agile resource allocation actions. Under this configuration, its organisational resilience evolves from technology-focused organisational resilience, business-focused organisational resilience, and dual-focused organisational resilience. In turn, the incumbent firm captures recovery, rebound, and surpassing capability. (3)the co-evolution between external crises, organisational resilience, and incumbent growth is the critical path to resist the impact of disruptive innovation for the incumbent. This study enriches the theoretical system of disruptive innovation and organisational resilience. It also proposes valuable managerial insights for incumbents to cope with disruptive innovation crises in future innovation markets.