Year: 2021
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The low-income, base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) environments which characterise many emerging economies, favour the development of successful disruptive innovations by technology-based companies, yet little is known about this phenomenon in the context of new technology-based companies (NTBCs) in South Africa.The purpose of the study was to investigate the entrepreneurial processes of NTBCs, by exploring the organisation-specific and contextual factors that influence disruptive innovation capability in South Africa's low-income environment.Following the development of a conceptual framework based on a set of qualitative propositions identified from the scholarly literature, a purposive sampling approach was used to select 20 participants in the NTBC incubation environment, to obtain their insights on the factors that enable or constrain disruptive innovation capability in low-income contexts.A semi-structured interview protocol was followed to collect data from start-up founders, business mentors and industry experts.Using the grounded theory method, the data collected were analysed through iterative coding and analysis cycles.The findings suggest that socioeconomic factors, such as the largely low-income population in South Africa, support the development of disruptive innovations.Their adoption by the market is, however, poor.Additionally, NTBCs in the local context lack an emerging-market orientation, which is crucial for the development of a disruptive innovation capability.Certain founder attributes were noted to favour the emergence of such capability, including high prior founder knowledge, strong learning capabilities, innovativeness, and passion and drive.Additionally, NTBCs face numerous challenges in developing a disruptive innovation capability, including low demand for products, poor market access, ecosystem fragmentation, and weak informational flows.On a practical level, a framework of disruptive innovation capability that highlights how NTBCs negotiate various constraining factors in the internal and external operating environments, was proposed.Theoretically, by investigating disruptive innovation capability through the lens of both resource-based and national systems of innovation theories, the study provided a holistic understanding of the internal and external factors that may influence this capability of NTBCs, in emerging economy contexts.Future work should involve a quantitative survey to further strengthen the framework developed and determine the industry scalability thereof.
Author: Esnah Dzimba
Language: English
Subfield: Business and International Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3199779805