Linking generativity and disruptive innovation to conceptualize ICTs
Purpose – This paper focuses on two prominent theoretically grounded approaches to this subject matter, namely disruptive innovations and generativity of the internet. This paper seeks to explicitly link these conceptual approaches in order to contribute to the epistemology on the development of ICTs.Design/methodology/approach – This paper is structured in three primary and functional sections. The first section provides a theoretically grounded literature review on the research on the generativity of the internet and on disruptive innovation as well as the research base and links and forwards these two lines of discourse. The second section describes how the conceptual foundations and assumptions of Zittrain's generativity of the internet and Christensen's disruptive innovation share common precepts and conceptual assumptions. The third section suggests that the discourse for each of the two approaches could be furthered by more deliberately and concretely drawing on the value of complementarities.Findi...