Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
a)
Faculty of Business Administration, Tohoku Gakuin University, 1-3-1 Tsuchitoi, Aoba-ku, Sendai,
Miyagi, Japan, a_akiike@mail.tohoku-gakuin.ac.jp
b)
Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan,
iwao5137@yahoo.co.jp
A part of this paper was originally published as Akiike and Iwao (2013) in Japanese, and an earlier
version of this paper was presented at the ABAS Conference 2015 Winter (Akiike & Iwao, 2015).
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1. Introduction
Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma 1 (Christensen,
1997) in 1997 as a compendium of his previous study (Bower &
Christensen, 1995; Christensen, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c, 1993;
Christensen & Bower, 1996; Christensen & Rosenbloom, 1995;
Rosenbloom & Christensen, 1994). This study has profoundly
influenced the business administration domain. Previous innovation
studies had highlighted the importance of markets and customers
(e.g., Abernathy & Clark, 1985, Foster, 1986); however, they tended
to focus more on the technological perspective (e.g., Abernathy &
Clark, 1985; Tushman & Anderson, 1986). Considering this situation,
Christensen mainly employed data from the hard disk drive (HDD)
industry to test the importance of markets and customers in
innovation.
How has The Innovator’s Dilemma been cited in subsequent
studies? The major problems addressed in this study include
assessing the influence of The Innovator’s Dilemma, which had
significantly impacted the business administration domain, and
offering some suggestions with regard to future research. This study
is structured as follows. First, the beginning of the second section
introduces examples of the manner in which Christensen’s study has
been cited in subsequent studies. Examining the major studies that
have cited The Innovator’s Dilemma, we can see that Christensen’s
study has influenced a broad range of research, from strategy to
5 See Kosuge (2007, 2015) for further information and empirical studies on
market orientation.
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6 See Ichikohji and Katsumata (2014) for further information on lead users
and user innovation, which have attracted attention in recent years.
7 In Christensen (1997), the author discusses established firms’ responses to
disruptive change in the second half of the study. Nevertheless, he says
that established firms can manage such changes by generating a new
stand-alone organization through a spin-off or other means. In other words,
he does not comprehensively discuss the responses of established
organizations.
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8 The term “disrupt” also appears in Abernathy and Clark (1985), which is
cited in Christensen (1992a).
9 In general, later studies (e.g., Christensen & Bower, 1996; Christensen &
Rosenbloom, 1995) have taken these views in refining and conceptualizing
this discussion.
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5. Conclusion
This study has suggested that existing studies consider the fact
Acknowledgements
We thank Mr. Takeyasu Ichikohji (Toyo University), Mr. WonWook
Song (The University of Tokyo), and participants of ABAS conference
2015 Winter for commenting on our research.
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