Is Innovation Becoming Less Disruptive? An Inventory of the Literature

TL;DR

Is innovation becoming less disruptive? The paper compiles 105 empirical studies to map whether disruptiveness declines across science, technology, and creative domains. It synthesizes results from multiple data sources (e.g., Web of Science, USPTO, patent text, audio/visual embeddings) and disruption indicators including $CD$, $D$, and $DI$, plus non-bibliometric proxies. The evidence shows a broadly robust decline in disruptiveness over time, with domain-specific rebounds and boundary conditions, suggesting the pattern is not an artifact of any single metric. The inventory provides researchers and policymakers with a consolidated resource, identifies mechanisms—such as shifts in team composition, aging of the workforce, and the burden of knowledge—and informs policy design to balance exploratory disruption with consolidation.

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.