Recognizing Disruptive Innovation Opportunities: A Configurational Approach to Team Learning

Predicting, prospective sensemaking, and creating potential disruptive innovation are critically important but challenging. In fast-changing environments, the recognition of disruptive innovation opportunities is more likely to result from collective endeavors rather than individual efforts. Despite teams being the natural incubators for innovative activities, the contributing factors that enable teams to generate disruptive innovation opportunities remain largely unknown. We take an ex-ante perspective of disruptive innovation and examine how individual and team level learning antecedents interact and contribute to the recognition of disruptive innovation opportunities. We employ a configurational approach - fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) - to identify different cross-level antecedents and our findings reveal three distinct team-level pathways with unique configurations leading to a high level of disruptive innovation opportunities, namely, sharing-integrating, improvisation-inspired, and star-lead. We also identify two pathways for a not-high level of disruptive innovation opportunities. This study enriches the disruptive innovation literature by introducing the ex-ante perspective and elucidating how teams might proactively, collaboratively, and creatively recognize disruptive opportunities. Furthermore, this study offers a new perspective for learning on how opportunity recognition of disruptive innovation can be conceptualized as a team learning process and through which to achieve a pragmatic synthesis between opportunity discovery and opportunity creation.