When Whales Meet Dolphins: Incumbent-New Venture Relationships During Architectural Disruption

Abstract

We focus on tensions between incumbents and new ventures in an industry-led corporate accelerator set up to ‘self-disrupt’ the maritime logistics value chain in the context of two technological discontinuities: digitalization and energy transition. First, we explore tensions that arise in incumbent – new venture relationships where the new venture may not represent a direct substitute to the incumbent, but rather, threaten to disrupt a given sector’s architecture of value-creating functions and associated ecosystem roles. Second, we explore the dynamics that may either enable or inhibit the ability of incumbents to respond to ambiguous threats in the face of sector disruptions. We develop an inductive model to theorize about these tensions and associated response and mitigations mechanisms in industry-led accelerators. Our research setting is a European maritime port complex where we conducted longitudinal case studies of both new ventures and value chain incumbents in the maritime, logistics, transport, energy, and refinery sectors.