Disruptive innovation and ecosystems: the case of evtols

Abstract

Technological changes have always provided profound economic and social changes, where the transportation mobility market has always represented a significant technological and business ecosystem. Combustion-powered motor vehicle production companies drive the current mobility ecosystem, and environmental, social and economic pressures have forced the reinvention of these technologies. The current market problems are an opportunity for disruption to change the entire innovation and business pattern of the existing ecosystem. Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing, or eVTOLs, are vehicles that combine vertical propulsion with long-lasting electric batteries and mechanisms for automation, communication and flight control navigation to create the possibility of transport moving from the land dimension to the air, facilitating transportation mobility. With the advent of these new technologies, the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) market emerges, which can impact the existing ecosystem and represent a leap in the market. Considering disruptive innovations as technologies and business models that affect the pattern within an existing ecosystem, eVTOLs are a technology with the potential to create a new disruptive innovation ecosystem. Such a context helps investigate current technological transformations based on the impact of new technologies on the disruption of established industries and the evolution of ecosystems. Thus, it is necessary to understand the structure of this new ecosystem in the face of this disruption. Based on these precepts, this Doctoral Thesis aims “to investigate whether the insertion of the potentially disruptive innovation of eVTOLs can impact the transportation mobility ecosystem”. This study is qualitative, descriptive, exploratory and predictive, and it seeks to understand the insertion of technology under development in the current ecosystem. The results point out that the disruption process potentially impacts evolving ecosystems, with characteristics of existing and new actors and technologies that will grow and develop around the disruption (Article 1). The arrival of new technologies for electrification, automation and eVTOLs has impacted companies from different sectors in search of more sustainable mobility (Article 2). This impact presents positive results in reducing consumption, emissions and financial gains, as opportunities for technological development leaps for countries (Article 3). These potential disruptions are restructuring the entire chain and the value proposition based on the development of disruptions, opening space for actors from different sectors in the evolution of this new ecosystem (Article 4). Finally, the scenarios point to the possible disruption of eVTOLs in the evolution of AAM markets. A set of necessary technologies and the restructuring of the value chain are a disruption in the innovation ecosystem, where the differentiated value proposition of the existing transportation mobility technologies transform the business ecosystem and opens space for the new market (Article 5). Thus, this Thesis argues that the impact of the disruption of eVTOLs is opening an opportunity for the evolution of the transportation mobility innovation ecosystem, co-evolving with actors and technologies, changing the value proposition of the existing ecosystem, and opening an opportunity for the creation of a new market from AAM.