When disruptors converge: The last automobile revolution

URL:

Résumé:

While the automobile industry is in a transition prompted by cutting-edge technologies that enable old and new players to envision more efficient ways of mobilising people and goods, a debate boils up as to the depth and breadth of such transition. This paper joins the debate from an analytical approach based on the dialectic issue life cycle (DILC) model, the theory of disruptive innovations and organisational concepts of neo-institutional scholars. It identifies that automakers are well involved into a phase of strategic diversification spurred by a unique historical convergence of alternative drive systems, digital technologies, new business models and newcomers. While changes take place at the level of sustaining innovations and industrial mindset is the dimension more radically changed, automakers are struggling in the search for an anew business-balancing act of value propositions, alliances, and organisational structures. © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.