Assessing the Disruptiveness of New Energy Technologies - An Ex-Ante Perspective

For those organizations that experience disruption, they usually understand the situation when it is already too late. The real challenge to any theory, especially if it is of high relevance for managers, is how it performs predictively. Can the theory of disruptive technologies be used not only to analyze cases ex post but to predict the potential disruptive technologies ex ante? Established companies are skeptical of the idea of disruptiveness, because of the difficulty of making predictions given the ex post nature of the theory. In this regard the goal of this report is to provide a general measure of disruptiveness and develop a framework that can assess technologies whether they have the potential to be proven disruptive. The developed assessment framework captures the essential characteristic and holistic success factors for disruptive technologies based on the theory of Christensen and a number of clarifications as seen in the literature. The framework is applied and validated by assessing the disruptive potential of five renewable energy technologies (wind energy, solar energy, biomass, hydro power, geothermal) in the power generation, heating and transportation sectors of four European countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Germany and Romania). The results show the applicability of the framework and give insights into technology and country specific determinants of energy market sector disruptions.