Insights into relationships between disruptive technology/innovation and emerging technology: A bibliometric perspective

“Disruptive technology & disruptive innovation” have been of scholarly interest for years, but there is still a need to better understand the nature of disruptions and their relationship to emerging technology processes. This paper pursues these issues by analyzing the interplay of technological emergence, disruption, and innovation. Applying bibliometric methods, the paper explores the conceptual foundations, themes, and research communities within these research domains. The results highlight the multiple theoretical foundations of research around technological change processes, disruption, and emergence. These differences among the domains invite conceptual cross-fertilization and consideration of interdisciplinary approaches to technological (and commercial) emergence. •Disruptive technology and emerging technology have been widely adopted, even occasionally entangled in scholarly dialogue.•Research on emerging technology stands largely apart from that on disruptive technology/innovation.•Co-citation analyses point to three largely distinct communities on disruptive technology/innovation and emerging technology.•Bibliographic coupling highlights topical emphases of the emerging technology and disruptive technology/innovation research.•Our analyses suggest potential for research that bridges the emerging technology and disruptive technology/innovation.