Success and Failure Traps in Innovation Adoption: Two Sides, One Coin?

Research on incumbents' response to disruptive innovation suffers from a success bias. The primary focus being on success traps, failure traps have received much less attention. This study uses a case study of two polar episodes of business model adaptation at a large financial service firm to elaborate and re-ingrate theory on strategic innovation. We find that balancing associated with complementary roles of top and middle management, yet the division of labor differed between learning traps. We also find significant differences in the practices used to balance in single ventures. However, more fundamentally, we find underlying tensions and antecedents to be a common denominator of the incumbent's response, independent of the particular learning challenge. Our main contribution is an integrative model that goes beyond categorizations of learning traps as mirror-inverted situations,
elaborating both underlying differences and commonalities.