Abstract
Innovation scholars have long looked into the managerial practices that incumbents should adopt to promptly respond to disruptive innovations (see, e.g., Christensen, 1997; Birkinshaw and Gibson, 2004). These practices include, among the others, the use of an open innovation approach or the establishment of ambidextrous organizations. However, this body of research has not analysed how these practices develop and unfold over time, although very often incumbents are confronted with waves of disruptive innovations that cyclically take place along the lifecycle of an industry (Moreau, 2013). This paper investigates this issue through a historical analysis (Gottschalk, 1969) of the global music industry. For each wave of disruptive innovation that hit this industry over the last fifteen years (digital music distribution, permanent digital download and streaming), we analyse the reaction of incumbents and develop a model suggesting how incumbents develop over time managerial practices to respond to cycles of disruptive changes.