個案資料

Thanks to new technologies and innovative new ways of doing business, established incumbents across all industries have never been more vulnerable to attack by agile challengers with relatively little capital or resources. A triad of forces favours today’s disrupters: virtualization, digitalization, and capital superabundance. The half-life of business models has been shrinking and incumbents have been disappearing at an increasingly rapid rate—swallowed up in mergers, taken over by activist investors, or broken up. However, the rise of disrupters does not fully explain the ever-shorter lifespans of incumbents. When executives were asked what they believe are the obstacles to growth, 85 per cent of the reasons cited were internal barriers. Large, long-established companies suffer from “incumbency sclerosis,” which leads to strategic rigidity and an inability to adapt. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) constitute one prescription, but their effectiveness depends on providing a catalyst for change in the acquirer’s business model, organizational model, and culture—if the acquired company is not destroyed in the process. The cure for incumbency sclerosis more often includes M&A along with other efforts to root out complexity, simplify the company, and build flexible operating models.

• incumbent strategy
• incumbent disruption
• incumbency sclerosis
• industry disruptors