Opportunity Myopia in Incumbents: Comparative Cases of Recognition Under Disruptive Transitions

Intarakumnerd and Charoenporn (2024) show Thailand’s BEV window of opportunity favored new entrants while incumbents remained tethered to ICE/HEV trajectories. Kreuzer et al. (2022) emphasize how DT disperses agency and blurs boundaries, potentially destabilizing incumbents’ category frames. We propose a comparative multi-case study across sectors undergoing disruption (e.g., EVs, fintech, agri-tech), contrasting incumbents’ and entrants’ opportunity recognition processes. Drawing on Lortie et al. (2023), we hypothesize that incumbents’ homogeneous knowledge corridors—reinforced by supplier networks and policy regimes—produce “opportunity myopia,” whereas entrants benefit from heterogeneous corridors that highlight new niches. We further integrate Khanin et al. (2021) to separate barriers of recognition vs. pursuit, and França et al. (2018) to capture the dynamics of nascent entrepreneurial action. The contribution is a process theory of how institutional embeddedness and legacy cognitive frames dampen recognition, not merely execution. The impact is twofold: guidance for corporate innovation units to deliberately “de-bias” recognition (e.g., institutional rotation, outsider teams), and for industrial policy to avoid FDI-only strategies that fail to cultivate indigenous recognition capabilities during windows of disruption.

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