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Two recent books will be of considerable value to company leaders and strategists seeking to deepen their understanding of the major trends driving this current wave of global transformation: “No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends” and “China’s Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent and Other Companies are Changing the Rules of Business.”

The author considers what dynamic capabilities that will be needed to compete in a world of “transient advantage,” like modern China, with its “complicated and quickly changing demand pattern,” hyper-competition, shifting industry boundaries, and “discontinuities in the regulatory context.” He believes that China is the business management laboratory within which these skills are already being honed.

By the turn of the millennium, the total revenue generated by private [Chinese] companies had already risen to parity with those of the state-enterprise sector, and since then it has grown more than six times faster.

The rise of China’s reform era entrepreneurs has come in three waves to date, each representing a significant progression in the collective capabilities and sophistication of the country’s ever-expanding entrepreneurial cadre.

Foreign multi-nationals would be wise to consider “what capabilities will have to be developed in China, for China,” learn from their Chinese rivals and ask where it might be possible to use these new “China’ capabilities ” to enhance performance globally.

The sharing economy has caught great attention from researchers and policymakers. However, due to the dearth of available data, not much empirical evidence has been provided. This paper aims to empirically assess the impacts of Airbnb on hotel performances in South Africa.

Using South Africa as a case study, the study measures the impacts of Airbnb on hotel performances on three key metrics, namely, room prices, occupancy and Revenue per available room (RevPAR). A difference-in-difference model is estimated using a population-based data set of 809 hotels from 2016 to 2018.

The results reveal that despite Airbnb significantly and negatively impacting on hotel occupancies it has a non-significant effect on hotel prices and RevPAR. Although from the theoretical perspective a disruptive innovation business model such as Airbnb can possibly have a negligible effect on hotel performances because it may attract a different group of customers and create a new market, the empirical findings of this study fail to support this theoretical hypothesis. Consequently, the findings diverge with newly developed knowledge in other markets and point to nuanced and contextual complementary effects.

Although some interesting findings are revealed into his study, some caveats remain. For instance, the study relied on data from hotels not from Airbnb. If the data of Airbnb can become available, it would be interesting to further examine whether the aggregated RevPAR of Airbnb can compensate for the aggregated loss of hotel RevPAR. This type of analysis could provide a broader evaluation scope regarding the overall effect of Airbnb on hotel performances. Moreover, if a longer time series data set of hotels in the post-Airbnb time period could become available, it would be interesting to further investigate the time-varying dynamic effects of Airbnb on hotel performances.

While hotels have launched a campaign to portray Airbnb as being commercial operators looking to compete illegally with hotels for the same segment of customers, this study shows that the rhetoric has been exaggerated. Airbnb, and more broadly, vacation rentals do not represent a war with hotels. They represent an answer to a different need. Indeed, the study reveals that Airbnb’s offer is a mere supplement to the market contrary to media rhetoric that it is meant to substitute hotels. The study has several implications for practitioners. First, these results are important because they serve as evidence against news articles that claim Airbnb is driving hotels out of business. They also show that if current trends continue, employees in the hotel industry in South Africa do not need to be concerned about losing their jobs because of Airbnb’s emergence. It is also important information for investors who may be concerned that Airbnb is hurting the hotel industry’s bottom line. Second, as the share of Airbnb listings on the accommodation market varies dramatically between cities, it is likely that eventual regulations/restrictions should be introduced in the provincial levels, while most of the cities continue benefiting from the increasing number of Airbnb visitors.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first in South Africa to provide empirical evidence that Airbnb is significantly changing consumption patterns in the hotel industry, as opposed to generating purely incremental economic activity.

Resale price maintenance (RPM) is widely regarded as having a retarding effect on market development. The abolition of RPM in the 1960s provided a catalyst for the development of the multiple retailer who, by virtue of scale economies, was able to compete aggressively on price for the first time. However, RPM remains in the UK bookselling sector in the form of the Net Book Agreement (NBA) and arguably many of the developments in the retailing industry of the last 30 years have passed this sector by. In the light of current challenges to the NBA from within the industry and other environmental factors affecting this sector, considers the impact on market development when one of a retailer′s important marketing weapons, namely price, is removed from its armoury. Reports results of an exploratory study into trade perceptions of the effect on market development of the NBA. Frames the analysis within the current theories of retail institutional change, concluding that a combination of environmental, cyclical and conflict theories of change is the most appropriate framework for an explanation of the current situation and future prospects in this sector.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the conditions that enabled the end of roaming charges in East Africa in 2006, achieving in weeks what European regulators had struggled with for nearly a decade. To do so it aims to explore the factors that drove marginalized operator Zain to seize the competitive advantage created by it having licenses in three adjoining markets.

The paper draws on the theory of disruptive competition and innovation pioneered by Clayton Christensen to explain the innovative and disruptive nature of the Zain business model. It is drawn on to explain why, despite Zain being unable ultimately to dominate its competitors, it had a sustained disruptive effect on the entire market. This provides a theoretical lens through which to view the empirical evidence acquired through in‐depth interviews and market analysis. This is used to develop a detailed case study on the dropping of roaming charges in East Africa.

The case study demonstrates the importance of an enabling policy and regulatory environment, which allowed operators to integrate historically separate national networks into cross‐border operations, undermining roaming markets in the region and ending roaming charges in East Africa forever. With the high price of communications in East Africa and the premium charges placed on international mobile roaming, the effect of this move was to compel other regional operators to follow suit, and further, to institute various other pricing strategies in an attempt to retain or recover their dominant positions. As a result, not only did roaming charges disappear across major networks, but the prices of various other mobile services also fell as subscriber numbers soared.

Research in this area is severely constrained by the inability to access pricing, traffic and revenue data from operators that is regarded as competitively sensitive. As a result it is often difficult to assess the immediate gains and losses of competitors and failure to get consistent data over time, the ability to assess lags and long‐term positions. A longer term review of the impact of these developments on pricing and the dynamics of the East African market in future would provide valuable insight into the longer term effects of these developments.

As policy makers and regulators elsewhere in Africa start to emulate European “best practice” regulation, despite the difficulties mature and resourced regulators in the European Union face in instituting legally binding maximum tariffs for roaming, a valuable alternative policy and regulatory strategy exists in the creation of enabling competitive environments in which incentives to reduce to eliminate roaming charge, rather than retain environments in which international call termination on roaming phones can be arbitraged.

Even though ultimately Zain was not successful as a disruptive competitor, it forced the dominant operators to reduce their roaming charges that resulted in sustained welfare gains.

This paper provides both novel theoretical insight and empirical evidence to explain the end of roaming charges in East Africa. It nuances perceptions in the popular and technical press that this was purely a market strategy that could be emulated anywhere else. It highlights the necessary enabling policy and regulatory environment that needed to be created and provides empirical evidence of the impact on competition in the market and analyses the outcomes of Zain's short term business strategy, against the longer term disruptive effect on the market.

This article aims to examine an existential question that all long‐established firms need to face: is there an effective competitive response to counter disruptive innovation, and if so, what is it?

The paper evaluates current alternatives to dealing with the battle to counter disruptive competition: continuous innovation vs “Good” management.

The paper concludes that the most reliable strategy is continuous innovation.

Only a small number of companies have pursued the approach and the experience is only in the ten to 15‐year range. More time is needed to assess the long‐term durability of the approach.

Most large organizations must make fundamental changes in the way they are managed if they wish to survive.

The paper offers a solution to disruptive competition, the most worrying management problem facing established organizations today.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate visually the knowledge structure and evolution of disruptive innovation. The paper used CiteSpace III to analyze 1,570 disruptive innovation records from the Web of Science database between 1997 and 2016.

Initially, this paper offers a comprehensive overview of papers, countries, journals, scholars and application areas. Subsequently, a time zone view of high-frequency keywords is presented, emphasizing the course of evolution of the study hotspots. Finally, a visualization map of cited references and co-citation analysis are provided to detect the knowledge base at the forefront of disruptive innovation.

The findings are as follows: the number of papers shows exponential growth. The USA has the largest contribution and the strongest center. The Netherlands shows the largest burst, followed by Japan. Journal of Production Innovation Management and Research Policy is the most important journals. Hang CC has the largest number of articles. Walsh ST is identified as a high-yielding scholar. Christensen CM is the most authoritative scholar. Engineering electrical electronic is the most widely used research category, followed by management and business. The evolutionary course of the study hotspots is divided into five stages, namely, start, burst, aggregation, dispersion and not yet formed. Eight key streams in the literature are extracted to summarize the knowledge base at the forefront of disruptive innovation.

This paper explores the whole picture of disruptive innovation research and demonstrates a visual knowledge structure and the evolution of disruptive innovation. It provides an important reference for scholars to capture the current situation and influential trends in this field.

Disruptive innovation is particularly important during recovery periods, as companies need to win back customers with radically new value propositions. The purpose of this paper is to pull back all of the clutter and to present three critical lessons that companies must consider in their pursuit of disruptive innovation.

The lessons were extracted from systematic observations of successful and unsuccessful industry disruptors.

Three key lessons were uncovered: the ability to anticipate and act on market discontinuities and unmet customer needs, with a particular focus on the business model; The ability link incremental and breakthrough innovation efforts by focusing on a single, shared aspiration; and the recognition that disruptive innovation can inform strategy, just as strategy can (and should) inform disruptive innovation

These three lessons could help companies envision and commercialize disruptive innovation that dramatically reshape the competitive landscape of their industries.

This paper is targeted at companies seeking to offer dramatically new values to their customers and fundamentally alter the competitive balance of their industries. Envisioning and commercializing disruptive innovations is a means to this end. By applying the lessons learned from successful and not so successful innovators, companies have a better chance at winning.

This Masterclass considers the lessons of two recent important books have contrasting but complementary insights to offer to company leaders and strategists on how to improve the odds for developing successful innovations in response to game changes in markets.”

In Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today’s Business While Creating the Future (2017), disruptive innovation experts, Scott Anthony, Clark Gilbert and Mark Johnson offer corporate leaders a “dual transformation” template for simultaneously repositioning the traditional core business in the face of disruptive change, while also creating new businesses to harness the growth potential typically unlocked by such disruption. In The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation (2017), innovation guru, David Robertson, and his collaborator, Kent Lineback, offer companies a “third way” for coping with historic market inflections by innovating around a core product to make it more compelling, rather than having to choose between attempting the radical or incremental innovation of the product itself.

The most powerful message that both books featured in this masterclass have to offer is that while it may be true, as they go on to observe, that large companies can’t innovate faster than the market, they can learn “to innovate better than the market,” through more imaginative use of legacy products, platforms and assets.

A “third way” to cope with market disruption is based on innovating around the core product, by surrounding it with a set of complementary innovations, rather than re-featuring the product itself. All of the complementary innovations operate together with the product “as a system or family to satisfy a compelling promise to the customer.”

Both Dual Transformation and The Power of Little Ideas, present different, but far from mutually exclusive, innovation strategies that can help many more great companies to survive disruptive competition.

The purpose of this study is to provide insights into the way in which understanding and implementation of disruptive technology, specifically big data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT), have changed over time. The study also examines the ways in which research in supply chain and related fields differ when responding to and managing disruptive change.

This study follows a four-step systematic review process, consisting of literature collection, descriptive analysis, category selection and material evaluation. For the last stage of evaluating relevant issues and trends in the literature, the latent semantic analysis method was adopted using Leximancer, which allows more rapid, reliable and consistent content analysis.

The empirical analysis identified key research trends in big data analytics and IoT divided over two time-periods, in which research demonstrated steady growth by 2015 and the rapid growth was shown afterwards. The key finding of this review is that the main interest in recent big data is toward overlapping customer service, support and supply chain network, systems and performance. Major research themes in IoT moved from general supply chain and business information management to more specific context including supply chain design, model and performance.

In addition to providing more awareness of this research approach, the authors seek to identify important trends in disruptive technologies research over time.