Disruptive potential of innovation from below

The theorist most attuned to the entrepreneurialism of the street was economist Joseph Schumpeter. He saw capitalism as a biological organism, an entity in a constant state of becoming the entrepreneur as the agent of constant mutation.

Operating at the edges of the system, the entrepreneur creates ruptures of change by replacing old arrangements and hierarchies with those that are unfamiliar and unknown. Schumpeter named this process "creative destruction".

China's word for disruptive technology is shanzhai, which translates literally as "mountain village" or "mountain stronghold". The term has strong connotations denoting a zone that operates outside of the law.