In contemporary competitive scenarios, the intensity of competition has grown tremendously with respect to the past, and innovation is the key to survival. An important part of companies' capacity for long-term success thus depends on knowing how to exploit technological evolution.

Technological innovation can be incremental, leading to increasingly refining one's offer to customers in a process of trading up, or disruption; a process that is able to undermine the foundations of the existing technology, offering performance that over time proves to be superior, at least for a significant part of the market. The decision as to whether to prefer investments in existing technology or try to develop a new and potentially disruptive one, is known as the "innovator's dilemma".

Faced with the emergence of a disruptive technology, traditional companies can adopt four different types of strategies: focus on the existing technology, develop a dedicated unit, await the evolution of the market, or destroy the disruption.