A Literature Review of Frameworks for Evaluating Potentially Disruptive Innovation

This article examines the support from the disruptive innovation literature in recognizing potentially disruptive innovations. A literature review was carried out resulting in ten articles containing frameworks for evaluating disruptive innovation. Potentially disruptive innovations are by their nature hard to deal with. Being able to recognize them is a first step in dealing with them, but recent disruptive innovation literature describes the field as fragmented and misunderstood. The overview presented in this article can be used as a guide by academics and practitioners that intend to approach the field. Among the frameworks three types were observed: frameworks for classifying into disruptive or not, frameworks for classifying into types of disruption, and frameworks assessing disruptive potential. A comparison is made within and between framework types to illustrate similarities and differences between how they characterize types of disruption and which factors they consider for evaluating disruptive potential. The frameworks are applied to the IoT innovation of usage-based auto insurance. It was previously the subject of a case study, showing disruptive potential as a part of the digital transformation of insurance companies. Then the frameworks are evaluated based on the learnings from the case study.