Disruption

The English word disruption entered the language in the early fifteenth century from the Latin disruptio, meaning a breaking asunder, from disrumpere, to break apart.1 For five centuries, the word carried its straightforward physical meaning: a rupture, an interruption, a disturbance.

In 1995, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen published an article in the Harvard Business Review introducing the concept of disruptive technology, later expanded in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma.2

Christensen's argument was specific: disruptive innovations were products or services that started at the bottom of a market, serving customers that established firms overlooked, and gradually moved upmarket until they displaced the incumbents.3 The disk drive industry was his primary case study.

Silicon Valley adopted the concept and stripped it of its precision. By the 2010s, disruption had become a reflexive compliment for any new technology company, regardless of whether it fit Christensen's original definition.

Christensen himself grew uncomfortable with how the word was used. In a 2015 Harvard Business Review article, he argued that many businesses commonly labeled disruptive, including Uber, did not actually meet his criteria.4 The word had escaped its academic container.

Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian, published a critical essay in The New Yorker in 2014 questioning both the evidence behind the theory and the cultural obsession with treating destruction as inherently progressive.5 The Latin word for breaking apart had become, in English, a term of admiration.