Open Access

Christiane Maria Horst, Hendrik Minis, Gerhard Gudergan

• Disruptive innovations confront companies with great challenges. Leading companies are losing their market position to disruptive competitors and are forced to react instantly to defend their position in the market. Companies not only lack knowledge of various strategic options that have been successfully used against disruptive attackers, they also do not know about the effects of these different strategic options on their own company. On the basis of a use case analysis, 30 companies were examined with regard to their strategic reaction on a disruptive attacker. In the evaluation of the use cases, the strategic options were grouped into clusters, from which seven master strategies could be identified. These seven master strategies were then transformed into a regulatory framework, which differentiates between reactive and proactive strategies and classifies them according to their intensity. With the help of the identified master strategies, companies will be able to identify options for action in competition with disruptive attackers, thus giving them greater chances of success in the defense of their market position. In addition, companies can use the master strategies to prepare an emergency strategy even before a disruptive attacker appears on the market, thus significantly minimizing the risk of customer loss.