This paper examines the proposition that, during a radical technological change, incumbents’ “incompetence” in researching the new technology results from their organizational inertia. I argue that prior studies have inappropriately assigned the disadvantage of organizational inertia and...

In this paper, I compare the dynamics of two different markets within the pharmaceutical industry: anti-cancer and AIDS-treatment drugs. The anti-cancer drug market was born in 1949 and had been in operation for decades prior to 1983, when the biotechnology revolution first disrupted it. In...

In studies of creative destruction, scholars agree that, within research-intensive industries, the demise of incumbents is significantly determined by their lower productivity in researching the radically new technology (Henderson, 1993). Such differences in the research competence of incumbent...

This paper examines the proposition that during competence-destroying technological changes, incumbents are incompetent in researching in house a radically new technology. They only retain market leadership if their undestroyed, proprietary complementary assets compensate for their research...

Traditional creative destruction theories distinguish disruptions as competence-destroying or competence-enhancing to incumbents’ capabilities, with the former case resulting in incumbents’ loss of competitive advantage in in-house R&D performance (even if complementary assets aid in...