Disruptive innovation and entrepreneurial firms in the sheet music industry

The question of how entrepreneurial firms manage their disruptive innovation is very interesting from an entrepreneurship perspective, yet maybe even provocative in light of extraordinary stories of the “Airbnbs” and “Ubers” of the world. Current disruptive theories suggest that disruptors are eventually able to better address consumer needs. With a comparative case study analysis presented in this article, we present a theoretical model that shows how entrepreneurial firms are a conduit by which founding teams with disruptive beliefs ambition to re-design entirely new consumer experiences. We researched the learning paths along which entrepreneurial firms make sense of the consumer needs in a context of digital change. Our entrepreneurial firms diverged in their perspectives: ranging from continuing serving present needs to re-shaping entire consumer experiences by an endeavour of building a community of users, developers and linkages to other software companies and music companies. Our finding opens up new debates about the nature of disruption and wonders to which extent this is a process managed by a new entrant alone or one in which more multilateral conditions are at play.