Digital innovation (DI) drives the digitalisation of goods and services, which also destroys established business models while creating new value chains. This effect is known as disruptive digital innovation (DDI). Beyond transportation and lodging, the effect is also evident in the news media industry. DIs facilitate an ecosystem in which the distinction between service providers and users become blurred – social media is birthing microbloggers as alternatives to incumbent media networks. There are questions on how firms—both incumbent and startups—strategically respond to DDIs and their effects. For the news media in developing countries, the concern is more acute. First, there are fewer established news sources; second, internet and media regulations are often non-existent or nascent stages, so experimentation is easier for DDI-enabled firms and citizen journalists; and third, fake news is not healthy for contexts with a history of political instability or where people have limited avenues to verify news, be it online, radio, or print. The need for this research is now.
TopIntroduction
Digital innovations have become a global phenomenon, but one with unintended and undesired effects. These digital innovations or technologies are creating digital disruption, rapidly digitizing businesses, breaking down industry barriers and creating new opportunities while destroying proven and successful business models (Weill & Woerner, 2015). Literature has established that digital innovations create a hypercompetitive market environment that forces firms which desire to survive and remain competitive to become agile (Chan, Teoh, Yeow & Pan, 2019; Infosys, 2018). This effect is known as a Disruptive Digital Innovation (DDI) (Chan et al., 2019). It has also been expressed in other terminologies including Disruptive Information System Innovation (DISI) (Carlo, Lyytinen & Rose, 2011), Disruptive Innovation (DI) (Parry & Kawakami, 2017), or Disruptive Technology (DT) (Christensen, 1997).
Notably, research on digital disruption dates back to the theory of disruptive technologies of Christensen (1997) who described disruptive technology as a “technology that, when first introduced, delivers (1) inferior performance on key attributes valued by mainstream markets and (2) superior performance on alternative attributes valued by “fringe” customers” (Parry & Kawakami, 2017, p.141). Thereafter, over time, products developed through disruptive technologies may also deliver superior performance on the key attributes which are valued by the mainstream markets (Christensen, 1997). These products tend to outperform the dominant existing products on the key dimensions that drive customer choice (Sood & Tellis, 2011). Hence, incumbent firms which fail to respond to or invest in disruptive technologies tend to lose when the mainstream markets begin to value the products of disruptive technologies. The products of disruptive technologies are known as disruptive innovations or digital disruptive innovations. Digital disruptive innovations are products birthed from disruptive technologies that deliver superior performance on attributes that are valued by or become the choice of mainstream markets (Yu & Hand, 2010). Thus, incumbent firms may initially consider digital disruptive innovations as ‘‘inferior’ innovations, which may be cheaper, simpler, smaller, more convenient, more accessible or less commercially packaged and are only valued by niche customer segments (Christensen, 1997). However, over time, these ‘inferior’ innovations gradually improve and become good enough to serve the mainstream market as a cheaper or more accessible alternative (Kumaraswamy, Garud & Ansari, 2018; Tellis, 2006). In effect, incumbent firms who fail to unwed from their business model and long-standing offerings suffer declining performance (Kumaraswamy et al., 2018). Incumbents are, therefore, advised by Christensen to develop their disruption by setting up a separate business unit to manage DDIs (Christensen, 1997).
Despite these contributions by Christensen (1997), DDIs are continually emerging and the dynamics of this new emergence has raised a number of questions. Almost every industry or sector has experienced some form of disruption, which leads to change (Butler & Martin, 2016). Sectors in which technologies have been disruptive include transportation and ridesharing (Circella & Alemi, 2018) and healthcare (Kushins, Heard & Weber, 2017). These innovations serve as platforms which other companies embrace to build upon and therefore disrupt existing relationships in entire industries and ecosystems, instead of affecting specific incumbent firms (Kumaraswamy et al., 2018).