Exploring Digital Disruption in the Global Consumer Healthcare Industry

Abstract

Over the last several decades, digital technology has driven the ‘creative destruction’ and transformation of low-complexity industries. Now, digital disruption is sweeping across more complex industries in the healthcare sector. Advancing this is the movement of large technology companies into healthcare. While the digital innovation activity of traditional healthcare providers, namely incumbents in the pharmaceutical and medical technology industries, is well documented, little is known about the focus and drivers for the digital innovation strategies of incumbents in the consumer healthcare industry. In response, this study sought to explore digital disruption in the global consumer healthcare industry by examining the digital innovation strategies of consumer healthcare multinationals. The broader technological change literature has demonstrated that the relative nature of discontinuous technological change has important implications for the resources, processes, and values that provide incumbents with competitive advantage. Incumbent firms require dynamic capabilities to respond to ‘competence-destroying’ and ‘disruptive’ technological change in order to avoid being disrupted. While these concepts have been examined in the digital disruption of less complex industries, they have not been examined in the consumer healthcare industry. This thesis addresses this contextual gap and adds to the growing theoretical knowledge on digital disruption. Four theoretical propositions based on the concepts in the technological change and dynamic capabilities literature was developed to guide the empirical phase of this multi-case study, which involved seven indepth interviews, observations and secondary sources. This study provides empirical evidence that digital technology can be considered both ‘competence-destroying’ and ‘disruptive’ to consumer healthcare multinationals with significant implications for existing resources, processes, and values. The findings also imply that the strategies of consumer healthcare multinationals reflect a creative accumulation, rather than a ‘creative destruction’ response. Therefore, consumer healthcare multinationals look to rely on their absorptive capacity developed through existing open innovation capabilities, and organisational ambidexterity at the inter- and intra-organisational level. This study adds to the understanding of consumer healthcare multinational digital innovation strategies, and contributes to the theoretical knowledge about incumbent response to digital disruption in a more complex industrial context. As an exploratory study, it also highlights important areas for investigation in future research.