The Topic Landscape of Disruption Research: A Call for Consolidation, Reconciliation, and Generalization

Using a natural language processing approach, the paper takes stock of extant disruption research and analyzes the full-text corpus of 1078 journal articles published on disruption between 1975 and 2016. This yields a topic map composed of 84 distinct topics that present the overall topic structure of this dynamic field. Topic network analyses uncover the existence of two increasingly disconnected subnetworks centered around disruptive innovation at the macro level and radical innovation at the micro level. This disconnect is consequential, as both perspectives appear to be highly interdependent and conceptually constitute two sides of the same coin. To counteract the threat of growing fragmentation and reconnect these subnetworks, three research priorities are proposed, firmly grounded in a systematic literature analysis: (1) the need to consolidate peripheral and decoupled topics, (2) the necessity to reconcile competing terminologies and refocus the theoretical core, and (3) the imperative to strengthen the generalizable empirical evidence base.