This paper studies how collaboration and competition between incumbents and new entrants co-evolves with technology forcing policies and influences disruptive innovation in an established industry. The empirical context for our study of disruptive innovation is the emergence of electric vehicle markets in the automotive industry. I find that the industrial lifecycle phase in which the automotive industry found itself at the end of the 20th century had triggered a strategy of “robust action” with carmakers: actively working towards keeping options open to respond to unknown futures. This robust action resulted in very active horizontal and vertical collaboration on the one hand, and constant experimentation with new technologies. The sudden success of specific carmakers in this process, had as unintended consequences that policy makers and other carmakers started realizing the very disruptive innovation for which these robust action strategies were trying to prepare. This finding shows that disruptive innovation is not always an agentic process that can be traced back to either incumbents or new entrants, but is rather a distributed phenomenon in which various actors play catalytic roles, often even without their intention.
