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Abstract
As the term disruptive technologies itself signifies, these are technologies capable of fundamentally disrupting the way things are done in the present. The impact of disruptive technologies provokes various kinds of responses in different stakeholders. Moving beyond the scope of the primary stakeholders comprised of the customers, complementary innovators, suppliers, and investors, these technologies can also create impact and provoke responses from a secondary set of stakeholders, namely, the competitors, activists, governments, media, public interest groups, local community and trade associations. This study was conceived with the belief that mapping the response trends in the environment of disruptive technologies can aid in a better understanding of how disruptive technologies serve the stakeholders. The earlier studies in the area were predominantly on the incumbent's response to disruptive technologies. Other rare studies that have attempted to analyze multiple stakeholders have done so from the perspective of a single technology. In this study, we attempt to analyze multiple stakeholder responses to various disruptive technologies in order to glean the existence of a pattern in these responses. This paper is a conceptual one, and the methodology followed is qualitative.