Disruptive innovation and its implications for Europe’s competitiveness

“Incremental” innovation improves existing products or services without causing major structural changes in the market. “Disruptive” innovation, by contrast, has more significant impacts, even rendering existing markets or products obsolete, while creating new markets. A forthcoming INNO-Grips policy brief introduces the concept of disruptive innovation and explores its implications for specific industries in Europe.

The concept is closely linked with Schumpeter’s work on creative destruction, where radical innovations create major disruptive changes in a market or in a whole industry. More recently, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s seminal work on disruptive technology (triggered by the bestseller “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, 1997) has highlighted the subject and initiated a debate about disruptive technology and its implications for business strategy, competitiveness and policy.

The forthcoming INNO-Grips policy brief will provide a synopsis of the main theoretical foundations in this domain, both from an economic (macro) and business (micro) perspective, and suggest an analytical framework to assess the role of disruptive innovation in different sectors. It will deliver innovation scenarios for two sectors, describing how expected innovations could unfold under different socioeconomic circumstances. On this basis, conclusions for strategic responses in innovation policy will be drawn. The brief will be published in late February 2012.

To validate the study results, an INNOGrips workshop on the same issue will be held in late January 2012 in Brussels. Requests to participate can be made to Mr Hannes Selhofer of empirica GmbH (hannes.selhofer@empirica.com).