A confusing definition of disruption

Abstract

It is important to measure whether a work is disruptive or developing. In 2016, Funk and Owen-Smith proposed novel indexes to evaluate the degree of a patent consolidating or destabilizing the technology streams (doi:10.1287/mnsc.2015.2366). Based on their methods, Wu et al. (2019) studied the disruption of articles, patents and software products, and made a conclusion that small teams are more disruptive than large teams (doi:10.1287/mnsc.2015.2366). Our research finds that the effect of NR on the disruption equation is contradictory as the sign of the disruption changes, and this problem may cause more trouble in any further work based on their indexes. When using other suitable approaches to measure how disruptive a work would be to the field of science or technology, we predict that there is no significant difference between large and small teams.