Incumbent firms facing disruptive business model innovations must decide whether to
respond through inaction, resistance, adoption, or resilience. We focus on resilient
responses to simultaneous perceived threat and opportunity by managers of small incumbent
firms. Using cognitive framing arguments, we argue that risk experience moderates
perceptions of opportunity, whereas perceived urgency moderates situation threat. We test
our framework in the real estate brokerage context, where small incumbents face considerable
challenges from disruptive business model innovations, such as discount brokers.
Analysis of data from 126 real estate brokers broadly confirms our fraframework. We conclude with implications of our research for small business incumbents.