Disruptive Innovation

Disruptive technologies and business models profoundly affect existing markets. The most visible recent examples are Internet-based "sharing services" that are disrupting conventional taxi and hotel markets, but there are many others in diverse areas such as finance, retail electricity and automobiles.Disruptive innovations can deliver important benefits to consumers and can stimulate innovation and price competition from established providers. However, they can also give rise to legitimate public policy concerns (e.g. safety, privacy) and create demands for regulation. Established providers will often lobby for existing regulations to be applied to new providers to lessen their competitive advantage, sometimes claiming rightly or wrongly that this advantage arises from an ‘unfair' exclusion from regulatory rules.But how far should regulation go, what role should competition policy play in these debates, and how might competition authorities participate?This issues paper served as the backdrop for a June 2015 hearing held by the OECD's Competition Committee, in which experts and delegates discussed current competition policy challenges arising from disruptive innovations