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. This article integrates 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, a theoretical framework is developed that explains disruptive innovation as a coevolutionary 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. The authors suggest avenues for future research and conclude with entrepreneurial strategies to help general managers create and cope with disruptive innovation. © 2012 The Braybrooke Press Ltd.