Dilemma

Often, new entrants take a radical step to offer better substitution to existing, mature products. They change the technology core. However, substitutions around the new technology core, invariably, emerge as inferior alternatives. They are neither attractive to customers of existing products, nor do they offer the profit-making opportunity to incumbent producers, who are offering products around mature technology core. Hence, incumbent producers face the decision dilemma-–whether to allocate resources to substitution or keep continuing incremental advancement of mature products. However, often such a decision dilemma leads to the failure of the incumbent producers to switch to substitution before the creative wave of destruction reaches the inflection point. Sometimes, it leads to the suffering of disruptive effects by the incumbent producers.