TEN years ago, “disruption” was the business world’s battle cry. Startups promised to disrupt every industry under the sun. Venture capitalists refused to fund anybody who didn’t promise to break things. Nervous corporate leaders talked about “disrupting themselves” before somebody else did it for them. The HBO sitcom Silicon Valley dispatched its tech-bro heroes to a conference called “TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014” (which was indeed a real thing).

Today business people have abandoned the word in favour of something blander – even people in the heart of the innovation furnace that is artificial intelligence (AI) prefer to use words like “transformation” and “advanced” instead. This is partly because the term was so overused that people got sick of it – the Guardian described it as having “the aftertaste of a sucked battery” – but more importantly because the idea was oversold.

Many industries remained surprisingly resilient to disruption: Elite higher education still depends on personal interaction – and rightly so – despite the frenzy about Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. And many that embraced disruptive innovation came to regret it: The financial services industry avidly pursued disruption in the form of collateralised debt obligations (CDO) only to see CDOs blow up their businesses. The coffee shops of San Francisco are full of people who once ran companies that were supposed to disrupt fat incumbents, but are now eking out a living on Mechanical Turk. Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who popularised the term in The Innovator’s Dilemma, produced a list of 77 cases of disruptive innovation. Only 9 per cent of them eventually succumbed to his model.