Conjecture

The four innovation types sort cleanly into which ones kill market leaders, and the dangerous one is dangerous because it is partially survivable. Incremental innovation is competence enhancing and reinforces the position of existing leaders. Radical and architectural innovation are competence destroying and open the industry to new entrants. But radical innovation is hard to miss: electric light threatened candlemakers and kerosene producers on different physical principles, and once adoption began the threat was unmistakable. Architectural innovation preserves the value of a firm's component knowledge while destroying much of the value of its architectural knowledge, so some of what the firm knows stays valuable, much does not, and some is actively counterproductive, and the firm cannot easily tell which is which. Partial obsolescence is harder to respond to than total obsolescence.

Capital mechanisms