The creative destruction of existing industries as a consequence of discontinuous technological change is a central theme in the literature on industrial innovation and technological development. Established competence-based and market-based explanations of this phenomenon argue that incumbents are seriously challenged only by ‘competence-destroying’ or ‘disruptive’ innovations, which make their existing knowledge base or business models obsolete and leave them vulnerable to attacks from new entrants. This paper challenges these arguments. With detailed empirical analyses of the automotive and gas turbine industries, we demonstrate that these explanations overestimate the ability of new entrants to destroy and disrupt established industries and underestimate the capacity of incumbents to perceive the potential of new technologies and integrate them with existing capabilities. Moreover, we show how intense competition in the wake of technological discontinuities, driven entirely by incumbents, may instead result in late industry shakeouts. We develop and extend the notion of ‘creative accumulation’ as a way of conceptualizing the innovating capacity of the incumbents that appear to master such turbulence. Specifically, we argue that creative accumulation requires firms to handle a triple challenge of simultaneously (a) fine-tuning and evolving existing technologies at a rapid pace, (b) acquiring and developing new technologies and resources and (c) integrating novel and existing knowledge into superior products and solutions. / Knowledge Integration and Innovation in Transnational Enterprise

New Product Development is vital to the performance of high-tech firms given the rapid change in technology and markets that they face. Drawing on the ambidexterity literature this study focuses on how firms can employ Ambidextrous Market Learning (AML), that is, the use of exploratory and exploitative market learning strategies simultaneously, to develop successful innovative products. Despite the exponential growth of studies focusing on ambidexterity, the literature portrays the ambidexterity concept as a present or absent like phenomena. However, in the current study, AML is conceptualised as a continuum of market knowledge that acts as a key source essential in creating customer value in the form of new products. Whilst research into ambidexterity contains abundant evidence of the positive effects of ambidexterity on firm performance, yet there is little discussion in the literature on the effects of AML on product advantage and the role of product innovativeness. A conceptual model comprising the relationship between AML, product advantage and product innovativeness is developed and empirically tested using 178 UK-based high-tech firms. The findings indicate that AML firms tend to develop products that have high product advantage. The study further focuses on how product innovativeness and product advantage constructs interact to create new product financial performance. Findings also suggest that marketing and technological discontinuity (product innovativeness from the firm s perspective) respectively has a negative and a positive moderating impact on product advantage. In addition, modelling product innovativeness from the customers perspective (customer discontinuity) in the same model sheds new light on the relationship between product advantage, product innovativeness and product performance. By further examining the moderating effects of marketing and technological discontinuity on the link between AML and product advantage, the analyses reveals the different scenarios in which the benefits of AML firms may outweigh its implementation cost.

En analysant les évolutions récentes de l'industrie du médicament, cette thèse apporte de nouveaux éléments, théoriques et empiriques, sur les mécanismes de transformation des industries de hautes technologies. Nous cherchons à comprendre pourquoi l'introduction de discontinuités technologiques ne conduit pas forcément au changement de l'industrie, et comment la logique dominante peut être remise en question. Pour répondre à cette problématique, nous utilisons une approche qualitative. Nous interrogeons des experts de l'industrie du médicament, et analysons onze études de cas d'entreprises de biotechnologies et de bioinformatique. Notre première contribution théorique est de proposer le concept de logique dominante pour compléter les travaux sur le cycle de vie des industries. Nous argumentons que les discontinuités technologiques sont une condition nécessaire, mais pas suffisante, du changement de phase d'une industrie. Le concept de logique dominante permet de prendre en compte les schémas généraux de création et de capture de valeur qui contraignent la stratégie des firmes évoluant dans l'industrie. Notre seconde contribution théorique est d'identifier quatre mécanismes de remise en cause de la logique dominante d'une industrie :nouvelles propositions de valeur, alliances avec de grandes entreprises d'autres industries, orchestration de réseaux, et portefeuilles de business models. Notre troisième contribution est managériale. Nous proposons un outil de la conception de la stratégie d'entreprise afin d'articuler promesses et risques, moyen et long terme. Enfin, notre quatrième contribution s'adresse aux managers et dirigeants de l'industrie du médicament. Nous leur suggérons quatre pistes de réflexion pour concevoir la stratégie de leur entreprise. / In analyzing recent developments in the drug industry, this thesis brings new elements, both theoretical and empirical, on mechanisms for the transformation of high-technology industries. We seek to understand why the introduction of technological discontinuities does not necessarily lead to change in the industry and on how the dominant logic can be questioned. To address this problem, we used a qualitative approach. We interviewed drug industry experts, and analyzed eleven case studies of biotechnology and bioinformatics companies. Our first theoretical contribution is to propose the concept of dominant logic to complete research on industry life cycle, where we argue that technological discontinuities are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to change the industry. The concept of dominant logic allows taking into account the general schemes of value creation and value capture that constrain the strategies of the firms that are in the industry. Our second theoretical contribution is to identify four mechanisms of challenge to the industry's dominant logic: new value propositions, alliances with large diversifying entrants, orchestration of networks, and portfolios of business models. Our third contribution is managerial. We offer a tool for the design of corporate strategy. This tool allows articulating promises and risks, medium and long term. Finally, our fourth contribution addresses managers and leaders of the drug industry. We suggest four ways of thinking about the design of their corporate strategies.

Rapid digitalisation development has been stampeding widely across today’s societies, and not least in the payment industry. Though, the digitalisation in the payment industry has been very deviating, even between similar well-developed countries, and while there are positive and negative effects with both digital- and physical payment means, there is little knowledge that highlights the influencing factors and accompanied problems. This study therefore explore swhich, and how, different factors influence a country’s degree of digital payments, and creates further understanding of where the payment markets are heading in the future. It is done through a case study of four different industrialised countries, Sweden, Italy, Canada, and Switzerland which involves mapping the countries’ payment markets, as well as potential factors influencing a population’s payment habits, through a perspective of innovation theory in terms of dominant designs and technological discontinuities. Theory of network externalities and two-sided platforms are further used to explain and discuss how a two-sided market, likethe payment market, is affected by changes and other circumstances in different ways.Conclusions are then drawn from the used theories together with a comparison of the findings,and identifies certain influencers to a country’s distribution of payments, as well as provides indications of where the different payments markets are heading in the future. Data is mainly gathered through written material and credible databases, but also from semi-structured interviews. / Den snabba digitaliseringen har slagit sig fram i dagens samhällen, och inte minst i betalningsindustrin. Dock har digitaliseringen i betalningsindustrin varit mycket avvikande mellan liknande välutvecklade länder, och medan det finns positiva och negativa effekter med både digitala och fysiska betalningsmedel, finns det inte mycket kunskap om påverkandefaktorer och medföljande problem. Denna studie undersöker därför vilka, och hur, olika faktorer påverkar ett lands grad av digitala betalningar, och vidare skapar ytterligare förståelse för var betalningsmarknaderna är på väg framöver. Detta görs genom en fallstudie av fyra olika industrialiserade länder, Sverige, Italien, Kanada och Schweiz, som innebär en kartläggning av ländernas betalningsmarknader, och av potentiella faktorer som påverkar befolkningens betalningsvanor, genom ett perspektiv från innovationsteori i form av dominerande design och tekniska diskontinuiteter. Teori om nätverksexternaliteter och tvåsidiga plattformar används vidare för att förklara och diskutera hur en tvåsidig marknad som betalningsmarknadenpåverkas av förändringar och andra omständigheter. Slutsatser dras sedan från de användateorierna tillsammans med en jämförelse av resultaten och identifierar påverkande faktorer tillett lands betalningsdistribution, samt ger indikationer på var de olika betalningsmarknaderna är på väg framöver. Data samlades huvudsakligen in genom skriftligt material och från tillförlitliga databaser, men även från semistrukturerade intervjuer.