How Incumbents Manage Waves of Disruptive Innovations: An Exploratory Analysis of the Global Music Industry

Innovation scholars have paid special attention on the managerial approaches that incumbents should adopt to promptly respond to the emergence of disruptive innovations. These approaches include, among the others, the use of open innovation or the establishment of ambidextrous organizations. However, this body of research has not analyzed how incumbents use these approaches over time, although they are very often confronted with waves of disruptive innovations that cyclically take place along the lifecycle of an industry. This paper looks into this issue through a historical analysis of the global music industry. For each of the three waves of disruptive innovations that have hit this industry over the last 15 years (i.e. digital music distribution, permanent digital download and music streaming), we analyze the reactions of incumbents in terms of managerial approaches they adopted to respond to the emergence of the disruptive innovation. Therefore, we develop a model suggesting how incumbents evolve over time their responses to cycles of disruptive technological changes.