Is Innovation Becoming Less Disruptive? An Inventory of the Literature

TL;DR

This paper reviews 105 studies across various domains, finding consistent evidence that innovation is becoming less disruptive over time, with some domain-specific exceptions and variations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive inventory and synthesis of existing research on the decline of disruptive innovation, highlighting patterns and gaps.

Findings

Evidence of decline in innovation's disruptiveness across multiple domains

Consistent results from citation, text, and network-based measures

Notable exceptions and domain-specific variations

Abstract

A growing literature has examined whether innovation is becoming less disruptive, spanning diverse domains and data sources and using a range of methodologies. This paper provides an inventory of 105 studies exploring this question. The evidence is largely consistent in direction. Studies spanning scientific papers, patents, products, legal cases, music, and visual art consistently report evidence of a decline. This pattern holds not only for citation-based measures, but also for text-based approaches, firm displacement rates, product similarity networks, and audio and visual embeddings. The literature has also identified notable exceptions, including rebounds in specific domains and predictable variation across field lifecycles. We catalog each study's data, methods, and findings to provide a resource for researchers and policymakers seeking to understand the current state of the evidence.