I have to admit I quite like the word “disruption”. Not for what it’s become, but because of what it represents.

It gained its new commercial world meaning on the pages of the Harvard Business Review in 1995. Actually it was technically never used. But “disruptive technologies” was – about 60 times.

In the article Clayton Christensen talked about very specific types of companies. They were those that challenged previously dominant industry rivals, first by wooing overlooked customers with new, usually cheaper technology that was almost always considered inferior by the “high-end” customers of the established competitors at the time of its introduction.

If that sounds unfamiliar, it’s because it’s very rarely the definition we hear today. If you’re finding it hard to reconcile that description with what Uber (the prototypical disruptor according to every “hackpreneur” and “winspirator”) did to to the taxi industry, you’re not alone. Christensen himself says Uber isn’t a disruptor going by his theory.

In fact, in an article in the Harvard Business Review a couple of years ago he wrote “Despite broad dissemination, the theory’s core concepts have been widely misunderstood and its basic tenets frequently misapplied…”