Tesla and the Chinese manufacturers are not playing in anything near the same league. Making cheap EV's is in no way "outcompeting" Tesla. Rather, Tesla has shown that it can handily outcompete traditional luxury auto companies, beating them at their own game.
The Innovator's Dilemma is about new, disruptive technologies causing large, established, incumbent firms to fail. Are the Chinese EV makers developing new technologies?
That’s exactly the opposite of the Innovator’s Dilemna. That’s the startup bros definition they use in pitch decks. But not Clay Christenson’s definition
It’s about products coming into the market at the low end that are “good enough” when the current leaders “over serve” the market - “low end disruption”. Examples are PCs -> mainframes, Linux x86 servers -> Unix boxes, digital cameras/phones -> regular cameras and even smart phones to PCs
Surprisingly enough, another facet of the Innovator’s dilemma is that low end disruption partially happens because the companies involved are not vertically integrated like Tesla and each part of the supply chain focuses on optimizing their components and have scale efficiencies because the low end market has more volume.
We see that now with Chinese ODMs in the EV space. We saw that before with x86 PCs vs Macs and to an extent with smart phones. Apple is kind of unique as a vertically integrated company. But even they don’t make their own processors or manufacturer their own devices
