Clayton M Christensen's theory of 'disruption' has been debunked. Can we all move on now, please?

One of the sacred texts of the tech industry is The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M Christensen. The key to its seductive appeal lies in the subtitle: "When new technologies cause great firms to fail." The book was first published in 1997 and was based on a set of case studies that, Christensen argued, showed that once-successful companies went under not because their managers made bad decisions, but because they kept making the same kind of decisions that had kept their customers happy for decades. In doing so they overlooked products that other kinds of customer might one day want, thereby missing untapped opportunities that eventually turned into industry-transforming ones. The "dilemma" of the book's title is that doing the right thing (keeping your existing customers happy) may turn out to be the wrong thing to do.

The process that unhorses great companies, Christensen argued, is "disruptive innovation" driven by technology. Some upstart firm invents and begins marketing a flaky – and, in the eyes of incumbents, inferior, product. This is not seen as a threat, because it's too crummy to interest established customers, who crave the premium quality, attentiveness and incremental improvements they get from incumbents. Thus mainframe customers were thought unlikely to be interested in minicomputers. Then customers of minicomputers were deemed unlikely to be interested in "personal computers". And so it went on until every organisation in the world was addicted to personal computers.

The poster-child for Christensen's theory of change is Kodak, the global company that completely dominated its industry – analogue photography – and was eventually destroyed by a disruptive technology: digital imagery. The delicious irony in the Kodak case was that it actually invented the technology that proved its undoing.

The Innovator's Dilemma and the Big Idea that it spawned – disruptive innovation – has been kind to its author. Professor Christensen is widely revered as a guru in the tech world. The idea of disruptive innovation appeals to the vanity of the start-up culture: it conjures up images of high-IQ geeks subverting the empires of men in suits, or at any rate in chinos. Christensen has extended his analysis to other, non-technological areas and industries. Education, for example, is apparently ripe for disruption. And of course companies such as Uber and Airbnb are supposedly bringing innovative disruption to the taxi and hotel industries respectively. Everybody and his dog wants to be in the disruption business.

And then, a few weeks ago, a Harvard historian had the temerity to ask if Emperor Christensen had any clothes. Writing in the New Yorker, Jill Lepore gave The Innovator's Dilemma the kind of unsympathetic third degree to which historians regularly subject the books of their professional peers. Her conclusion was unflattering, to say the least. "Disruptive innovation as a theory of change," she writes, "is meant to serve both as a chronicle of the past (this has happened) and as a model for the future (it will keep happening). The strength of a prediction made from a model depends on the quality of the historical evidence and on the reliability of the methods used to gather and interpret it. Historical analysis proceeds from certain conditions regarding proof. None of these conditions have been met."

Lepore's excoriating analysis provoked interesting reactions. Christensen himself was baffled and outraged, like a Catholic cardinal who has been asked by an impertinent urchin why is he wearing a scarlet frock. More generally, the Lepore critique prompted more self-aware folks to ask whether they should perhaps have been more discriminating in their use of the term. "In the past few years," wrote one industry observer, Kevin Roose, "I've gotten literally hundreds of pitches for products billed as disruptive innovations. (My favourite? A wooden cuckoo clock, whose creator promised it would 'add verve to more austere ambiences in search of a stylistic disruption'.) I've been invited to conferences on disruption, seen books with titles like Disrupt! Think Epic. Be Epic, and read about USC's new innovation programme, which advertises a 'degree in disruption'." When everything is disruptive, Roose concludes, "nothing is. Which is exactly why it might be time to kill the word disruption altogether."

Spot on. US business schools are sausage machines for the production of soi-disant big ideas such as Christensen's. It's a pernicious genre based on one simple principle: the "idea" must be big enough to seem profound, but it mustn't be so profound that it cannot be memorised by halfwits and used in PowerPoint presentations. The key thing, though, is that it must not, under any circumstances, be subjected to critical scrutiny. Professor Lepore has more work to do.