Disruptive innovation discourse: are academic research and news media on the same page?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The research aims to explore and compare the framing of the disruptive innovation phenomenon by the business media and the academic literature. For this purpose, 1160 news articles available on the Factiva database and 228 academic papers published in the Web of Science in the last 20 years were content analysed through an automated text-mining method. The results revealed that the representation of the disruptive innovation phenomenon in the news media diverges with the academic discourse despite the common vocabulary. While researchers describe disruptive innovation as a process/business model involving an improved performance, the media has not yet evolved from the technology-based perspective. Also, the media tends to focus on the features of the disruptive products and services but fails to discuss their value to the market. The framing of the social side of disruptive innovation also differs. The study offers three contributions: (i) it reveals the main concepts representing the term ‘disruptive innovation’ in the media and scholar discourse, (ii) it suggests future academic research avenues based on media interest and (iii) it emphasises media coverage gaps stemming from its failure to communicate the advances in the academic research on disruptive innovation.