Emerging Disruptive Technologies focused strategy: a constraint management approach

Businesses across all industries are facing increasing challenges, which put their competitiveness at stake. Challenges range from disruptions driven by world conflicts and global politics to a perceived increase in socioeconomic risks. With the increased competition, businesses make a considerable effort to sustain a competitive edge in their arenas. A factor ever impacting business performance is technology—a major driver of competitiveness, accelerating innovation and new product development. All these factors together are putting pressure on business leaders and top management teams across any industry. They have to manage finite resources and funds, while at the same time dealing with tough choices on how to react to technological threats, which may affect their businesses, sometimes with catastrophic consequences, as has happened by the effect of technological change along history. At times, an apparent technological advantage may prompt business leaders to consider alternative technological paths. Such decision-makers oftentimes lack a framing and pragmatic approach to assess such potentially emerging technologies. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a strategy to deal with the danger posed by Emerging Disruptive Technologies (EDTs). It suggests businesses how to design a well-thought-out plan that will help them be more resilient and competitive when faced with the threat of possible EDTs. The methodological approach is based on causal logic and a constraints management approach. Taking the defining dimensions of EDTs (strategic, operational, tactical, technical, and organisational), the methodological approach starts by identifying and making problem symptoms visible, together with the chains of cause and effects, which typically originate and drive such symptoms. Oftentimes strategy design imply solving dilemmas and making suboptimal choices, however, by using some tools such as the Categories of Legitimate Reservation, as well as the concept of Conflict Resolution Diagram, both tools from the Theory of Constraint framework, apparent dilemmas, aka dichotomies, are broken allowing for the design of optimal solutions. The results are shown as logic trees, which help through all the strategy development stages, from problem characterisation to strategy design and planning for implementation. This paper also intends to provide academics as well as practitioners with a strategic problem solving framework, which can be further customised for any organisation or strategic situation where the threat of EDTs is a real concern. Overall, and moreover an EDT-influenced strategy is critical for supporting decisions concerning technology investment, capability development, and other strategic initiatives.