Electrification and digitalization as disruptive trends: New perspectives for the automotive industry?

Abstract

Climate change, growing urbanization, and technological developments like digitalization and electrifi cation (“diglectrifi cation”) change societal requirements and customer preferences toward motility and mobility in the future, especially automotive mobility. The international automotive industry is under pressure because of these tectonic shifts. There is a strong societal and political push caused by the climate change issue and the strategies as well as measures mitigating the climate change. Traditional OEMs are in a sandwich position between societal requirements and customer needs. Therefore “low-emission and zero-emission vehicles," “connected car," and “autonomous driving” have been on the agenda of the automotive industry since several years. The drivers of these trends are partly newcomers in the automotive industry, like Tesla Motors, Google, or Apple. The growing role of disruptive innovations is in the focus of politics, business, and academia. The leading idea of this paper is to design a conceptual framework, whereby open and discrete innovation approaches as well as cost of ownership approaches as key elements are applied to strategies and measures for “diglectrical” disruptive innovations in the automotive industry.