Purpose. A small number of management theories have had as much influence in the business world as Clayton M. Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. Its key presupposition – that entrant companies with products or services that customers initially couldn’t use as it appears to have lower performance can supersede established companies – continues to create a significant impact on management practices and stimulate rich debate within academics. The goal of this thesis is to validate a specific framework available on the literature that assess the potential market entry of new companies as sources of disruptive innovations, named “disruptive susceptibility”, and gain new insights based on the findings of a qualitative study related to the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) industry. Trending topics on this fast paced evolving industry, such as “Connected Cars” or “Autonomous Vehicles” are creating a high source of inspiration and new technologies are emerging to address new ITS industry’s needs.

Methodology. Mixed methods research approach was applied utilizing convergent parallel mixed design. The research design process enabled an accurate confrontation of the disruptive susceptibility framework’s propositions against the target industry’s evidences collected from multiple relevant sources of evidences. Content validity and triangulation were applied to bring validity to the study.

Theory. Disruptive innovation, Disruptive Susceptibility, Industry life-cycle.

Conclusions. The disruptive susceptibility framework was validated for the ITS industry concluding that is a relevant instrument to identify and qualify the disruptive potential of new technologies. The results showed a high level of disruptive susceptibility in the ITS industry and the evidence gathered showed that conditional and accelerating propositions, when present, are most likely connected to an industry in a mature life-cycle stage. The study of the framework in further industries could provide more insights about this latter aspect. Furthermore, an additional proposition related to product life-cycles was proposed for the framework.