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The purpose of this paper is to investigate a competitive evolutionary process we call “innovation overshooting” that has been observed in equipment-based sports, using windsurfing as a case study.

The case-study approach is based upon primary data gathered through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with pioneers of the case-study sport and through analysis of international and domestic industry publications and grey literature.

New sports, in particular equipment-based “lifestyle” sports, can experience a rapid rise in popularity but eventually technology-driven competition leads to equipment overshooting the capabilities and financial budgets of most users. This Schumpeterian market process leads to a rapid decline in participation and the eventual collapse of the market for the sport’s equipment.

Models of endogenous overshooting are established in the study of finance and business cycles, and have recently been extended to the music and design industry. The authors extend this to the sports equipment sector finding clear evidence of evolutionary competitive technological and market overshooting.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how adoption drivers change before and after key milestones of ICT product adoption (i.e. critical mass point (CMP) (adoption rate 16 percent), market saturation point (MSP) (50 percent) and new generation release point (NGRP)) based on actual subscriber data of the mobile communications industry that represents the ICT market, so that it has implications for the rejuvenation of ICT product adoption that has rarely been addressed in earlier studies.

This study examined the overall characteristics of ICT product diffusion by tracking the actual patterns of US and Korean mobile market subscribers using the Bass diffusion model.

This study found that innovation effects gain influences on ICT product diffusion after CMP, MSP and NGRP; imitators are becoming innovators by repeated rejuvenation experiences; and cultural differences have significant influences on imitators’ ICT product adoption, but not on innovators.

These findings imply that rejuvenation enabled by technology innovation is a key success strategy to dominate the ICT market where the number of innovators, who have strong desires for new generation products, is constantly growing.

The innovation pyramid presented in this paper ranks innovation types in terms of their capacity to provide organizations with a long-term commercialization advantage.

It is based on ten years of studying different types of innovation and helping hundreds of groups of MBA and Master students apply these insights to hundreds of organizations in different industries.

The innovation pyramid provides organizational leaders with a powerful heuristic to organize their strategic innovation priorities, in terms of aligning and committing organizational innovation efforts.

To help organizational leaders, this paper illustrates each innovation type with clarifying examples of a variety of well-known firms.

The pyramid provides an antidote to the technological determinism and confusing use of innovation jargon, both of which over-promise disruptive and radical performance effects. Instead, it offers clarity and succinctness of purpose both in terms of aligning and committing to innovation efforts and priorities.

In order to understand the influence of technology innovation on market demand diffusion in the ICT service market, the purpose of this paper is to examine technology innovation in the mobile product market, which keeps a complementary relationship with the mobile communication market.

This study collected mobile communication user information of four leading countries in the ICT market – the USA, the UK, Korea, and Japan from 1981 to 2014. This study applies the Bass diffusion model to analyze the form of market demand diffusion and conducts white noise test to verify the hypotheses.

Technology innovation of mobile communication leads to an increase in innovation effect and a decrease in imitation effect. Thus, technology innovation of mobile communication needs to be promoted continuously for the purpose of increasing adopters in the early stage. Besides, mobile product’s technology innovation leads to an increase in imitation effect and a decrease in innovation effect, because individuals were aware of the usefulness of the products and services. Hence, the increase in the number of imitators caused a higher increase in imitation effect than in the mobile communication’s innovation effect.

Based on the results of this study, the role that product and service technology innovation plays in renewing the form of market demand diffusion in the ICT service market was defined. Also, since the strategies and plans to acquire competitive advantage of business were understood, it may help both companies and policy decision makers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how ICT service providers’ strategies affect customer migration.

Using a simulation approach and the agent-based model, this research explores how an incremental technology affects customer migration and changes the market structure.

The authors found that a strategy of disruptive technology innovation not only helps a follower company increase its market share, but it also completely disrupts the market.

This study investigates customer migration patterns in the saturated mobile telecommunication market based on service providers’ strategies.

After discussing this case, students will be able to understand the challenges faced by social entrepreneurs in starting a health-tech start-up in Africa; create and evaluate lean business models of health-tech companies as a social enterprise; evaluate how health-tech start-ups were developing innovative business models and supply chain networks to make prescription drugs accessible and available in Africa; understand how inorganic growth strategies can help health-tech start-ups scale up; and evaluate what promises investors were seeing while investing in social enterprises in the health-care sector in Africa and what social wealth they were creating.

In August 2022, Gregory Rockson (Rockson), social entrepreneur and founder of for-profit health technology (health-tech) social enterprise in Ghana, mPharma, stated that he had plans to replicate the company’s business model, which provided people access to drugs and at affordable prices, to other African nations, beyond the company’s existing footprint. However, analysts pointed out that the fragmented drug supply chain and poor regulation in the health-care market across Africa could act as a challenge for mPharma to replicate its business model successfully across the African continent. People in Africa were forced to pay higher prices to buy life-saving drugs due to the continent’s fragmented drug supply chain. To add to their woes, pharmacies struggled to keep life-saving and life-sustaining medicines in stock. Often, patients traveled miles to a pharmacy only to find out that the drugs they needed were not in stock. In addition to this, the markets were flooded with counterfeit drugs. And the Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the situation. mPharma managed the prescription drug inventory for pharmacies and drug suppliers using its proprietary vendor management information system. By using the technology infrastructure it had built, the company connected patients, pharmacies and hospitals through a cloud-based software. The system enabled doctors to track in real-time which drugs were available and at which location, thus giving patients reliable access to medicines. Patients registering with mPharma with their prescriptions and medical history received an alert on their mobile phones notifying them where the drugs they needed were available. mPharma bought drugs from major drug manufacturers such as Novartis International AG, Pfizer Inc. (Pfizer) and Bayer AG, on behalf of the pharmacies. This enabled the pharmacies to save on the up-front costs of stocking the drugs, reduced supply constraints and ensured availability of drugs to consumers in these underserved markets. The company had a consignment model wherein member pharmacies had to pay only for what they sold. Most pharmacies forecast the number of drugs they needed and purchased them from mPharma at pre-agreed rates. The company took the inventory liability to prevent pharmacies from going out of stock. As mPharma used its purchasing power to buy drugs in large quantities from drug manufacturers and suppliers, it was able to help patients realize cost savings of 30% to 60% in the purchase of medicines. mPharma was focusing on achieving its ambitious goal of dominating the health-care market in Africa in future. However, analysts felt that the company would face challenges related to poor regulation in the health-care market, high prices of drugs and the fragmented pharmacy retail market in the continent.

This case is intended for use in MBA/MS level programs as part of a course on Social Entrepreneurship, Sustainability, Business Model Innovation, Disruptive Business Models, and Supply Chain Management in the Drug Industry.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to test the overshooting effects of monetary expansion on prices of agricultural products at farm production, processing and circulation stages in China, and to investigate the heterogeneity of the overshooting mechanisms in these three links.

Empirical results are obtained through the vector error correction model and the overshooting framework proposed by Saghaian et al. (2002b). Specifically, we first apply the Dickey–Fuller generalized least squares (DF-GLS) method to test the stationarity of the key variables, and then use the Johansen’s (1991) method to conduct the cointegration test. Finally, the vector error correction model is employed to examine the overshooting hypotheses in the three stages of China’s agricultural sector.

Empirical results indicate that overshooting of prices relative to monetary expansion in China’s agricultural sector is a common phenomenon, but with significant heterogeneity. Firstly, at the stage of agricultural production, the overshooting degree and restoration rate of material price are greater than those of agricultural products price. Secondly, at the processing stage of agricultural products, both the purchase price of agricultural products and industrial producer price have an overshooting effect, but the overshooting effect of the former is more significant than the latter. Thirdly, at the circulation stage of agricultural products, the overshooting coefficient of the wholesale price index of agricultural products is the most significant, while that of the retail and purchase price of agricultural products is not significant.

The paper contributes to proposing a comprehensive framework on testing the overshooting effects for three main stages of agricultural sector in China and empirically investigating the heterogeneity of the overshooting mechanisms in different stages with time series methods.

This paper aims to study a parameter tuning method for the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) to improve the anti-interference ability and position tracking of the performance of the servo system, and to ensure the stability and accuracy of practical applications.

This study proposes a parameter self-tuning method for ADRC based on an improved glowworm swarm optimization algorithm. The algorithm is improved by using sine and cosine local optimization operators and an adaptive mutation strategy. The improved algorithm is then used for parameter tuning of the ADRC to improve the anti-interference ability of the control system and ensure the accuracy of the controller parameters.

The authors designed an optimization model based on MATLAB, selected examples of simulation and experimental research and compared it with the standard glowworm swarm optimization algorithm, particle swarm algorithm and artificial bee colony algorithm. The results show that the response time of using the improved glowworm swarm optimization algorithm to optimize the auto-disturbance rejection control is short; there is no overshoot; the tracking process is relatively stable; the anti-interference ability is strong; and the optimization effect is better.

The innovation of this study is to improve the glowworm swarm optimization algorithm, propose a sine and cosine, local optimization operator, expand the firefly search space and introduce a new adaptive mutation strategy to adaptively adjust the mutation probability based on the fitness value, improve the global search ability of the algorithm and use the improved algorithm to adjust the parameters of the active disturbance rejection controller.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new classification of rules-driven sports and technology-driven sports that suggests different models of how sports develop. This paper outlines some key aspects of an evolutionary view of sports economics research and, separately, an institutional view of sports economic research.

This paper is a conceptual/theoretical piece rather than an empirical analysis of a research question. The authors scaffold a proposed analytic framework that is a combination of evolutionary economics and new institutional economics.

A new dynamic approach to the study of sports industries is called for. The authors observe that sports and sports industries exhibit dynamic qualities but in the study of sports there is no analogue of “industrial dynamics” as in economics. What is missing is the field of “evolutionary sports dynamics.” To build this, the authors frame a new evolutionary approach to the study of the sports economy and sports industries – by examining the evolution of sports, their industries, and the complex industrial ecosystems they operate in, through the lens of institutional and evolutionary economics.

The paper establishes a theoretical basis for a “New Economics of Sports” – as a shift in the types of questions that sports economics seeks to answer. These are away from “sports statics” – as a branch of applied economics of industrial organization and optimal allocation of sports resources (ala Rottenberg, 1956; Neale, 1964) – and toward concern with the economics of “sports dynamics.” The prime questions are less with the optimal organization of existing sports, and more toward understanding the origin of new sports and the evolutionary life cycles of sports.

Interviews Professor Clayton Christensen, who has authored or co‐authored three groundbreaking books that together frame the daunting problems that managers must confront when they lead innovation initiatives.

Strategy & Leadership contributing editor, Dan Knight, asked Christensen about the finding of his research and its implications for managers.

Most managers are not familiar with Christensen's contention that leading companies fail after only a few decades at the head of the pack because they rely on two conventionally accepted concepts: listen to your best customers and focus investments on the products with high profit margins. Companies that pay exclusive attention to their current top customers and ignore the first minute signals of disruptive forces emerging in their market will not adopt innovation that will make them successful long‐term.

Christensen alludes to his research methodology and suggest that it is superior to that of most observers of the innovation process. A comparative study would be valuable.

Christensen suggests that organizations segment their markets by “customer jobs to be done” in order to identify new growth opportunities. He explains why when you are growing, innovation proves to be a lot easier than when you stop growing. Another nugget: “being a serial disrupter means that on a regular and rhythmic basis you launch new disruptive innovations when you don't really need new growth.”

While all of Christensen theories have been explained in his books, many managers are likely still unfamiliar with the many practical implications of his unconventional wisdom. The interview serves as a lucid introduction to ideas like managing disruptive innovation.