Disruption in the ICT-Sector: Will Former Telecommunications Monopolists Stumble across VoIP?

In the context of the European wire-line telecommunications industry this work elaborates on the popular claim that the data-oriented voice transmission technology Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) does constitute a disruptive technology or innovation. The inability to anticipate new technologies, which emerge from below, has often been put forward as the main reason for the failure of established firms and the advantage for the attacker, namely the new entrant. Previously, the most dominant view in technology strategy was that the displacement of established firms and technologies by new firms and their technologies is driven by the superior performance characteristics offered by newcomers and the incumbents’ difficulties in matching their performance and capabilities. Clayton M. Christensen calls all new technologies that exhibit improved performance characteristics sustaining technologies. They can be incremental, radical or discontinuous, but what they all have in common is that they improve the performance with respect to the technology used before (Christensen, 1997). However, by identifying the possibility that technologies with inferior performance can displace abstract

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