While reading about disruptive innovation and some hints on how manager should tackle its challenges, I thought on some discussion that I had recently regarding new strategy for established companies that are quite stagnant.

One company, a the dealer of Mercedes Benz in Chile, had the problem that the margins where getting smaller and smaller and less people where buying cars. So they decide a strategy of not only to keep on doing business as usual but also start a car shearing business, which uses MB cars. In their own words, they are letting the old company to continue its maturity till it dies and starting what they believe is their future. The main difficulty that they had was to manage both business under the same company.

This is similar to what it is proposed in one of the reading in the sense that established incumbent business should be looking to disruptors or be disruptors themselves. Managing such duality under the same company, I believe, is really difficult. Especially when it comes to investment decisions because to some extent one side will undermine the other. Another option would be to manage both separately, but this also has some drawbacks.

I would really like to hear what other thinks regarding on how should managers apply this kind of dual strategies..