Responding to Complementary-Asset Discontinuities: A Multilevel Adaptation Framework of Resources, Demand, and Ecosystems

We examine how incumbent organizations respond to complementary-asset discontinuities — technological changes that introduce new manufacturing, distribution, and sales assets but leave the incumbents’ core knowledge preserved. To examine this increasingly common but relatively overlooked phenomenon, we conducted an inductive study of how six newspapers adapted to Internet distribution from 1995 to 2019. Our contribution is a framework that highlights three levels of adaptation (resources, demand, and ecosystem) with related mechanisms and necessary outcomes. At the resource level, incumbents adopt the new complementary assets according to the perception of synergies with their existing core knowledge. At the demand level, the extent to which incumbents update their beliefs about value creation depends on how much they experiment with customers. At the ecosystem level, higher experimentation in the ecosystem helps incumbents to update their beliefs about value capture. The research offers important implications for the technological change, strategic management, and business model innovation literature.