Are outliers more disruptive? Technological niche, disruptive innovation, and recombinant capability

Whether disruptive technologies are more likely to emerge at the margin or the core of industry has been a long-debated issue. We theorize the relationship between technological niches and the generation of disruptive innovations. Introducing the main path analysis, we develop a novel indicator to depict firms' technological niche in a focal industry's technological landscape and link it to their performance of disruptive innovation. Further, we investigate its boundary condition by taking firms' recombinant capabilities into consideration. A sample of 29,655 USPTO patents of the electric communication industry (H04W/L) for the period 1995–2019 is used to test our hypotheses. Our research reveals an inverted U-shaped relationship between a firm's technological niche and its disruptive innovation performance. Besides, firms' recombinant capability could moderate the relationship by steepening the curvilinear. This paper helps reconcile the long debated question of ‘Are Outliers More Disruptive’ by providing a contingency perspective and identifying a non-monotonic relationship.