Resumo

Disruptive Innovations have the potential to create new markets and, at the same time, change the landscape of an industry by challenging established organizations and helping newcomers (entrant organizations) to grow and succeed. Even though these innovations bring to market technological changes and new value propositions that, most of the times, are very difficult to predict or to revert, we believe that managers and their organizations can be better prepared if they have a robust Competitive Intelligence (CI) system to help them anticipate and manage information to act properly.

The research question is: • Can Competitive Intelligence help organizations be better prepared on dealing with disruptive innovations? The specific objectives are: • Evaluate if CI can help anticipating and understanding potential disruptive innovations. • Correlate CI with managers enhanced capabilities of dealing with disruptive innovation. • Propose a practical framework on the use of CI to help managers deal with disruptive innovations.

We divided the theoretical references into three different dimensions: • Disruptive Innovations: concepts, definitions and the process of how disruptive innovations evolves (Christensen, 1997). • Competitive Intelligence (CI) and Weak Signals: concepts, definitions and how CI can help organizations detect weak signals (Ansoff, 1975) & (Gilad, 2004). • Competitive Intelligence (CI) and Disruptive Innovations: relationship between the two constructs and how CI can help organizations deal with disruptive innovations (Christensen, Raynor, & McDonald, 2015).

We conducted a literature review to create a theoretical essay with the objective of contributing to the theories of CI and Disruptive Innovations and to the relationship of both fields. The adoption of a theoretical essay on this article was done as we believe that it is the more adherent to the achievement of the proposed objectives. As this research is based only on theoretical review of the literature, it brings some limitations as the findings were not empirically tested and thus the concepts discussed in this article should be validated in a real life setting.

With the analysis of the content we were able to draw the following results: • CI can help managers deal with disruptive innovations as there is a process underlying these innovations and CI can foster management knowledge of this process; • A solid CI strategy fosters management capabilities to deal with disruptive innovations as they can be more aware, informed and knowledgeable; • We proposed a practical framework on the use of CI for the management of disruptive innovations based on a matrix of change scenarios correlating consumer and technology trends.

We concluded that CI can be an important aid to managers on predicting and acting in the face of disruptive innovations and we finished the study by proposing a practical framework on how managers can use CI to help them predict and manage potential disruptive innovations on their industries. We believe this study may be helpful for both practitioners and academics from the field of CI and innovation and we propose that the findings may be empirically tested to assess validity of concepts.

Ansoff, H. I. (1975). Managing Strategic Surprise by Response to Weak Signals. California Management Review, XVIII(2), 21–33. Christensen, C. M. (1997). The Innovator’s Dillemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (1st ed.). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Christensen, C. M., Raynor, M., & McDonald, R. (2015). What Is Disruptive Innovation? Harvard Business Review, 93(12), 44–53. Gilad, B. (2004). Early Warning: Using Competitive Intelligence to Anticipate Market Shifts, Control Risk, and Create Powerful Strategies (1st ed.). New York, NY: AMACON.