Disruptive Innovation and Market Leaders

In Knowledge@Wharton:  How does disruptive innovation effect market leaders?  Not unexpected results, will be interesting to see some numbers.

" ... a study soon to be published in Management Science discovered that disruptive innovations need not lead to an incumbent’s fall, despite prevailing academic theory arguing otherwise. The paper, “Dynamic Commercialization Strategies for Disruptive Technologies: Evidence from the Speech Recognition Industry,” was authored by Wharton management professor David Hsu, Matthew Marx, a professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship and strategic management at MIT, and Joshua Gans, a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto.

Indeed, the authors discovered that start-ups introducing disruptive technologies with long-term potential are more likely to end up licensing to incumbents or agreeing to be acquired rather than turning into rivals. While these start-ups would initially compete with established firms, the motivation is to prove the worth of their innovation to a skeptical industry that has not seen it before. ... "