Good Disruption Lab
Good Disruption Lab - The Disruptive Innovation Initiative
Good Disruption Lab
Our goal is audacious: to better harness data and improve models to predict the likely trajectory of novel technologies. We wish to do so to understand how to influence the direction of technological change in ways that best benefit society. By doing so, we hope to not only understand when technology disruption occurs but to understand how good disruptions that ultimately benefit society occur.
In the Good Disruption Lab, we are researching the underlying forces that drive technological change.
A hallmark of market-based economies is the periodic disruption of existing technology regimes by new, transformational technologies that reshape competition, markets, and society. We know much about how such transitions unfold: learning curves that drive S-curves of technology improvement and diffusion, market entry by existing market players and new entrepreneurial ventures that drive competition, and shakeouts that result in new business models and a new competitive ordering.
Our core research program is the creation of industry histories for various sectors facing technology disruption. We combine rich case descriptions of those sectors with detailed data on competition and market evolution. Together, we use these data to train models to help predict the trajectory of technological transitions. We plan to launch an interactive website with detailed visuals on each sector once we have collected sufficient data.
Faculty Leads
Mike Lenox
Interim Dean, University of Virginia Darden School of Business, Tayloe Murphy Professor of Business Administration
Rory McDonald
John Tyler Associate Professor of Business Administration
Lead Researchers
Maelle Perez
PhD candidate in Strategy, Ethics & Entrepreneurship
Maelle A Perez is a PhD candidate in Strategy, Ethics & Entrepreneurship at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Maelle A. Perez (HEC Lausanne MSc) has a professional background in working for leading technology companies and a deep academic focus on disruption theory, entrepreneurship, and strategic adaptation. Her career began in the tech sector, where she witnessed firsthand how emerging technologies reshape industries and redefine entrepreneurial opportunity. This experience now informs her research on how technologies—particularly artificial intelligence—transform organizational structures and challenge established firms. Her work explores how firms perceive and respond to disruption, and how AI can augment managerial decision-making in dynamic competitive environments. She is particularly interested in how managerial cognition influences firms’ recognition and strategic responses to emerging technologies.
Currently a doctoral student at the Darden School of Business, Maelle collaborates with leading faculty members, including Dr. Mike Lenox, and Dr. Rory McDonald. Her research has been presented at prestigious conferences such as the Academy of Management and the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS). Maelle co-authored a book chapter with Dr. Saras Sarasvathy titled “Stopping the Slide and Rising Above the Tide: Entrepreneurial Education to Move Out of Necessity into Opportunity,” published in Necessity Entrepreneurship: Getting Beyond the Binary (2025).
Yalin Xing
PhD student in Strategy, Ethics & Entrepreneurship
Yalin Xing is a PhD student in Strategy, Ethics & Entrepreneurship at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. She studies how organizations respond to change, particularly as markets are reshaped by new technologies and institutions. Methodologically, she enjoys crossing boundaries between quantitative analysis, qualitative inquiry, conceptual theory-building, and computational tools to better understand how strategy unfolds in complex environments.