Interplay between technology and meaning: How music majors reacted?

Abstract

The diffusion of digital technologies enables companies to propose new business, products and services. The business environment is characterized by increasing levels of competition, and customers can choose a growing number of solutions. In this scenario, companies seek new dimension of innovation: the meaning. A vigorous debate has taken place among scholars on the strategies that companies may use to react to external innovations. Until now, the phenomenon has been analysed grounded in the technology‐push literature. The goal of this study is to understand whether these strategies are still valuable even if innovators leverage not only on the technology but also on a hedonic dimension proposing an innovation of meaning. Through a multiple case‐study analysis, based on both primary and secondary sources, we investigate whether the case companies from the music industry also used the strategies described in the literature to cope with technological innovations that leverage both on technology and meaning.

How do Big Bang Disruptors look like? A Business Model perspective

“…Two main types of revenues may be identified: a direct purchase or a subscription-based purchase (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010). Further developments in the digital business models brought to a broader classification: advertisement, freemium, in-app selling or pay-per-usage (e.g., Buganza et al, 2015;Maurya, 2012;Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010;Trabucchi et al, 2017a).…”

“…A clear example of this may be Airbnb, which has seen its business model taking off when the mission of the company become "Belong anywhere", proposing users' to use their booking services, instead of other digital platforms that rely on hotels and professional providers, to have the chance to feel a "local" experience all over the world, feeling at home (Gallagher, 2017). Similarly, also Spotify -representative of the first cluster -leverage innovation of meaning and has been studied in that perspective (Trabucchi et al, 2017a).…”

Designing radical innovations of meanings for society: Envisioning new scenarios for smart mobility

“…Moreover, the insights on performance from other case studies (i.e., Xbox and PlayStation 3 for the gaming industry) illustrate that it is possible to succeed by acting only on the technological dimension, but that future perspectives are subsequently limited due to the rapid speed at which technology evolves, and a substitution may occur that transforms a formerly innovative project into an old‐fashioned one (Verganti, ). In contrast, the idea of combining the functional and semantic dimensions strengthens competitive advances by opening new paths to a promising future (Buganza, Dell'Era, Pellizzoni, Trabucchi, & Verganti, ; Dell'Era, Altuna, Magistretti, & Verganti, ; Trabucchi, Pellizzoni, Buganza, & Verganti, ).…”

Exploiting incumbents' potentialities: From linear value chains to multisided platforms

“…Incumbents tend to focus on the already controlled and penetrated market without recognizing when the market changes and hence when new opportunities in adjacent markets emerge (Leonard‐Barton, 1992). This provokes myopia in incumbents that are not able to seize new market opportunities and even more in accepting a new direction (Trabucchi, Pellizzoni, Buganza, & Verganti, 2017) or adopting the emerging technologies introduced by new entrants (Buganza, Dell'Era, Pellizzoni, Trabucchi, & Verganti, 2015; Magistretti & Dell'Era, 2019; Magistretti, Dell'Era, & Verganti, 2020b). Such myopia may also be accompanied by the fear of cannibalization, whereby they often do not introduce new products to existing or new markets because they fear cannibalizing existing ones (Chandy & Tellis, 1998).…”