Most innovation is a gradual process. The modern obsession with disruptive innovation, a phrase coined by the Harvard professor Clayton Christensen in 1995, is misleading. Even when a new technology does upend an old one, as digital media has done to newspapers, the effect begins very slowly, gathers pace gradually and works by increments, not leaps and bounds. Innovation often disappoints in its early years, only to exceed expectations once it gets going, a phenomenon I call the Amara hype cycle, after Roy Amara, who first said that we underestimate the impact of innovation in the long run
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