Disrupting or Disturbing?

Abstract: This qualitative multiple case study has identified and examined two environmental sustainability innovations and their implications on the dairy value chain by utilising an abductive research approach. For this purpose, plant-based and cellular agriculture innovations in the U.S. dairy industry served as the case objects of the study and were analysed in terms of their disruptivness. Thus, plant-based is a business model innovation in form of a high-value alternative to dairy with the proven potential to disturb the dairy industry. Cellular agriculture instead is a technological innovation that displays a substitute to dairy and has the ability to disrupt the dairy market. Furthermore, the implications the two cases entail for the upstream value chain were assessed in order to evaluate and compare the innovation’s disruptiveness. Consequently, the study derived that cellular agriculture entails the strongest implications for farming and transporting, as they become redundant in theory, but displays an opportunity for large processing actors. In contrast, plant-based innovations encompass less implications to the upstream value chain as the innovation only requires another form of farming. Nonetheless, both innovations negatively contribute to the already occurring creative destruction of small farmers due to increasing developments towards industrial production. Conclusively, the research aimed to broaden the theory of disruption by highlighting that high-value innovations can be characterised as disruptive, however their realised effect disturbs rather than disrupts the market. Furthermore, it acknowledges that innovations can be considered as disruptive even if they do not creatively destruct a whole market, but replace established products to a certain percent of the market share. Therefore, the research entails that innovations can have the attributes of a disruptive innovation but their realised effect is only disturbing the market.