Papers › A Disruptive Research Playbook for Studying Disruptive Innovations
A Disruptive Research Playbook for Studying Disruptive Innovations
Margaret-Anne Storey, Daniel Russo, Nicole Novielli, Takashi Kobayashi, Dong Wang
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
As researchers, we are now witnessing a fundamental change in our technologically-enabled world due to the advent and diffusion of highly disruptive technologies such as generative AI, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). In particular, software engineering has been profoundly affected by the transformative power of disruptive innovations for decades, with a significant impact of technical advancements on social dynamics due to its the socio-technical nature. In this paper, we reflect on the importance of formulating and addressing research in software engineering through a socio-technical lens, thus ensuring a holistic understanding of the complex phenomena in this field. We propose a research playbook with the goal of providing a guide to formulate compelling and socially relevant research questions and to identify the appropriate research strategies for empirical investigations, with an eye on the long-term implications of technologies or their use. We showcase how to apply the research playbook. Firstly, we show how it can be used retrospectively to reflect on a prior disruptive technology, Stack Overflow, and its impact on software development. Secondly, we show it can be used to question the impact of two current disruptive technologies: AI and AR/VR. Finally, we introduce a specialized GPT model to support the researcher in framing future investigations. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of adopting the playbook for both researchers and practitioners in software engineering and beyond.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections