“Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that”

Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that. It doesn’t explain change. It’s not a law of nature. It’s an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; it’s the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, it’s blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.

Jill Lepore, “The Disruption Machine”, The New Yorker (23 June 2014), 36.