Research on high-end disruptive innovations - Analysis and insights from the video conferencing systems market

This paper provides a chronological overview of product, service, technology, and business trends related to the videoconferencing systems market from the 1980s to 2022, and analyses and discusses how the product architecture and business models of videoconferencing systems changed over this period. From previous studies related to disruptive innovation, the paper analyzes, discusses, and clarifies that the emergence of cloud videoconferencing services is a “high-end disruptive innovation” - a phenomenon that revolutionized the market for traditional hardware videoconferencing systems and opened and drove not only the existing videoconferencing market but also new markets. The paper then presents new insights into the mechanisms of high-end disruptive innovation, which are different from the “low-end disruption” and “new market disruption” asserted by Christensen, from the perspective of innovation management and strategic management theory, including product architecture, business models, and dynamic capabilities. •Context.•Why can't existing leaders in high-end markets respond immediately to high-end disruptive innovation? What strategies and organizational management is needed to respond? To answer these questions, it is important to understand the existence of the mechanisms of high-end disruptive innovation, which are different from the low-end disruption, new market disruption, and sustained innovation that Christensen advocated, and more in-depth exploratory research from the perspective of innovation management and strategic management theory including product architecture, business models, dynamic capabilities, etc. is deeply discussed in the paper.•Literature.•The literature to which this study relates is a series of accumulated studies by Christensen (e.g. Christensen, 1997; Christensen and Raynor, 2003; Christensen, 2006; Christensen et al., 2015) and Van der Rhee et al. (2012) in their framework of ‘high-end disruptive innovation’. We have identified a RESEARCH QUESTION from these previous studies and derived new theoretical and practical insights. This paper analyses and discusses the mechanisms of ‘high-end disruptive innovation’ from a deep time series of qualitative studies on new product development in the IT sector.•Core Strengths.•There is little accumulation of concrete examples or previous studies on high-end disruptive innovation, which is the theme of this paper. This paper provides a chronological overview of products, services, te