Embracing Bewilderment: Responding to Technological Disruption in Heterogeneous Market Environments
研究了爱立信如何在170多个国家应对云计算这一颠覆性技术，揭示了企业需匹配异质客户需求与复杂创新过程，并依赖“错位能力”管理战略、结构和资源配置的不一致性。
ABSTRACT In an age of rapid advances in technology, understanding how firms can respond to emergence of disruptive technologies is paramount for survival. While prior research on incumbents’ responses to disruptive technologies assumes demand homogeneity, many firms, including multinational enterprises (MNEs), need to respond to technological disruption in heterogeneous markets. To address this lacuna in our understanding, we study how Ericsson tried to respond to the emergence of Cloud computing, a digital platform technology, across its operations in more than 170 countries. We reveal how incumbents need to match diverging customer demands with a complex innovation process, involving different approaches to experiments and trials, deployment strategy, and ecosystem development. We also find that the success of incumbents’ responses depends on their capability for misalignment, which allows them to manage the inconsistencies in strategic direction, structure, and resource configuration associated with a complex innovation process.