A RACE pathway for inventing and sustaining mobile payment innovation - A case study of a leading Bank in Taiwan

Abstract

This study aimed to propose a resource framework called RACE to demonstrate how a conventional financial service provider developed a defensive strategy to secure existing assets and dynamically evolved to enter new areas of competition and achieve offensive success. RACE stands for technology resources (R), strategic alliances (A), customers (C), and ecosystems (E), which represent the critical resources of a conventional bank for digital transforming in the mobile payment market. The study adopts an explorative single case study to analyze Inter-firms’ coopetition in the market and to explore how competitive advantages were developed through a critical path of RACE model. The revelatory case is a leading financial institute in Taiwan. A qualitative case analysis was conducted and the results revealed that through dynamic interplays of the proposed RACE model among the internal and external resources, a conventional enterprise can create new competition battleground and develop new types of coopetition. The innovative disruption in advancing mobile payment is not a straightforward process, the journey is full of challenges from defensive resource exploitation to offensive market acceleration. The Implications of the evolving path of the RACE model provide various avenues for further research on the dynamic capabilities, and the results are suggested for academics and practitioners in the era of digital disruption.