Abstract:
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) operate in an environment where their
existence are impacted by information technology – an attribute of Society 5.0, adoption
of technologies and resource scarcity. As a key contributor to countries’ economy, SMEs
need to innovate, create social businesses, and develop new business models to stand the
test of time. Hence, SMEs must focus on key aspects that will empower them to leapfrog
the traditional pathways of development and innovate. The purpose of this study is
to present SMEs with a disruptive innovation key factor checklist based on an
investigation of key disruptive innovation factors from the literature. The disruptive
innovation key factor checklist was developed by analyzing a corpus of 137 papers
through an automated content analysis process. Ten themes and 38 concepts were
identified that informed the categorization to the Technology-Organization-Environment
framework and the creation of the disruptive innovation key factor checklist. To create
an instantiation of the checklist, we mapped the key factors checklist to an SME case
study. By considering the checklist, SMEs are guided to optimize their innovation
strategy, stakeholder engagement, technology adoption and innovation impact.
