Strategizing With the Digital Core: Escaping Hybrid Traps Through Disruptive Visioning

Abstract

Disruptive innovations often appear ex post as sudden breaks, yet they are typically preceded by prolonged, uncertain periods during which incumbents and entrants experiment with old and new technologies. While intergenerational hybrid offerings can help manage such uncertainty, they also risk creating “hybrid traps”, where customers overserve on hybrid solutions and competencies become locked into sustaining trajectories. This paper investigates how new entrants navigate these hybrid traps during early-stage disruption. Drawing on digital entrepreneurship research, we focus on two practices – articulating disruptive visions and developing technology-in-use templates – as mechanisms through which innovators mobilize resources and gain customer support. Based on an ethnographic study of an early-stage firm introducing advanced visualization services in the UK housing construction sector, we conduct a multimodal analysis the entrepreneur’s evolving pitch deck to and the evolving understanding of the technology to conceptualize disruptive visioning as an iterative process in which scripted technology-in-use templates embed disruptive features into customer operations, balancing sustaining and disruptive trajectories over time. Our findings contribute to disruptive innovation theory by showing how templates enable entrants to escape hybrid traps through iterative experimentation with customer adoption. More broadly, we advance digital transformation research by highlighting how technology suppliers not only shape but may drive industry disruption through the co-creation of operational templates with users.