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Dec 11, 2025 Business Administration Entrepreneurship Faculty Research in Education

When Disruption Grows Up: Examining Uber’s shift from radical startup to mature firm

By John Moist

Since its inception in 2009, Uber has been synonymous with the sharing economy. The platform promised affordable rides, a flexible source of income for drivers, and ushered in a new era of the app platform. If you've ever hailed a ride on your phone, you've already joined the sharing economy, rewriting with every trip how we think about supply and demand.

But more than a decade later, Uber isn't the same disruptor it once was. It’s less the “scrappy underdog” and more the establishment player. That transformation raises an important question: what happens when a radical innovation grows up?

In a new study published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management, Gies College of Business experts Erica Lee (right) and Aric Rindfleisch argue that the Uber of today behaves less like a disruptive tech startup and more like a traditional, mature firm.

"We were interested in exploring how innovation occurs in the sharing economy, and Uber stood out to us as a really great fit," said Lee, a doctoral student in Business Administration. "It's one of the representative sharing economy platforms, but at the same time, it's offered numerous different offering-based innovations over its history."

Uber, the researchers concluded, was a perfect way to study how firms innovate over time.

"There are two iconic qualities of the sharing economy," explained Rindfleisch, John M. Jones Professor of Marketing. "One is that they allow you to have access instead of ownership, and the second is that they crowdsource supply. Uber is an iconic example of both of those qualities, and it's been in the market since the sharing economy started."

Tracking Uber’s Shift Through the Data

In "Innovation in the sharing economy: Examining Uber's transformation," Lee and Rindfleisch worked with coauthor Praveen K. Kopalle of Dartmouth College to explore the trajectory of innovation in the sharing economy using Uber as a case study. The team analyzed over 17 million individual ride reports for both Uber and taxis from the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission and tracked Uber's product and service offerings over time. Their analysis paints an interesting picture: Uber has shifted away from its original mission of access and affordability, edging toward higher ride prices, more firm-controlled resources, and increasingly conventional innovation strategies.

"The data showed us that Uber was charging more than regular taxi rides," said Lee. "Uber has shifted away from its initial mission of offering a cheaper alternative to a traditional taxi."

The data back it up: during December 2022 in New York City, Uber rides cost on average $7.15 more than a “traditional” trip in a taxi – up to 28% higher. The team dug beyond pricing to explore the history of Uber's innovations by collecting blog posts, marketing materials, and more.

"Both the data and the innovations we tracked revealed that Uber's offerings shifted and gave us evidence of a consistent pattern from a more pro-social perspective toward a profit-driven or profit-maximizing perspective," said Lee.

Today, Uber offers services like Uber Copter and Uber Eats, many of which require it to more tightly coordinate assets and supply. It's also charging a premium for its core ridesharing services. As Rindfleisch puts it, those moves signal something broader: a "normalization" of Uber's once-radical business model. That same normalization shows up across other sharing-economy platforms. Airbnb began as a platform for sharing space, then shifted into a systematized network with stricter rules, formal standards, and a closer eye on regulatory compliance. The early platform era’s tendency to “move fast and break things” has shifted toward a mode of maximizing profit and control.

"Firms have to balance the inherent tensions between the social aspirations and economic perspectives of the sharing economy," said Lee. “Our research shows that it seems as firms mature, as sharing economy platforms mature, they head more primarily toward the profit perspective."

What drives that shift? Part of the answer lies in the nature of innovation itself. Disruptive innovations that permanently shift a market are rare. Most firms rely on a broad base of incremental shifts and changes to drive steady revenue growth.

"You can't have a portfolio full of these radical innovations," continued Rindfleisch (right). "Most firms don't have the ideas; they can't support it. It's just too radical. It's also always about making money, right? I think what you're seeing is that it's much easier for a firm to do those things when they control the resources."

The Life Cycle of Innovation

That shift goes beyond the accounting books to broader norms and the regulatory environment itself.

"What Uber is doing in all of those legal disputes, these regulations, the policies and innovations... it's setting up the norms for what we should understand and accept as part of facilitating the sharing economy,” said Lee. “I think that's definitely something to keep in mind. There's a need for us to really understand what happens as consequences and implications when sharing economy platforms mature. That's not really been looked at in the field."

The study makes a broader argument about the life cycle of innovation and the nature of the sharing economy itself. With the sharing economy now a part of our everyday lives, it's important to remember that disruption is only the beginning. What matters, in the long run, is what comes after.

"Personally, what I think this really gets down to is us offering a framework to understand how the what and the how of the sharing economy are shifting," said Lee. "That helps us get a preview of where other platforms might be headed as they move from being radical outsiders to an established market presence."

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