Firm responses to disruptive innovations: Evidence from the music industry

In a time of fast technological change, firms are increasingly confronted with (digital) innovations that challenge and disrupt their business as usual.
Rather than assuming incumbents to be displaced by start-ups that introduce such disruptive innovations, it is important to understand how firms can address the challenges of disruptiveness.
The different theoretical and empirical explorations of this dissertation provide new insights into firms and their responses to disruptions.
The findings of this dissertation emphasize that even though disruption has far-reaching consequences for firms and industries, firms are able to purposefully pursue a certain, recognized opportunity by taking up agency in how they manage the challenges created by disruption.
This explains how and why similar firms develop different organizational responses to disruptive innovations, while different firms develop similar organizational responses to such disruptions.
The results of this dissertation offer interesting avenues for future research into the dynamics of firms’ responses to disruptive innovations.