Master's Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,0, Cass Business School, language: English, abstract: An increasing number of journalistic articles and academic literature deal with the struggle of established companies to fend off the attacks by industry newcomers such as Airbnb, Spotify, Netflix, Google and many others. These companies enter traditional industries with innovative business models and compete in a manner, which makes it challenging for incumbent firms to understand their novel competition and respond effectively. This study introduces a typology of three stages of industry disruption that classify the newcomer’s developmental stage and describe the incumbent’s competitive position in terms of competition intensity and remaining time to respond. It is demonstrated how incumbents may conduct their strategic reasoning along these stages to arrive at a strategic goal and evaluate possible counter-measures.