Micromobility is a transportation buzzword. It describes the recent proliferation of e-bikes, scooters, hoverboards, next-wave auto-rickshaws, and any number of similar conveyances across the world’s cities. Some consider micromobility a revolution, others a menace. But there’s no denying the power of the word itself, which over the past five years has become a lasting catchall for an otherwise amorphous trend.

The word was coined not by a transportation professional but by Horace Dediu, a tech analyst who had zero presence in the world of mobility and was largely known for his coverage of Apple. (Balaji Srinivasan, the noted Silicon Valley entrepreneur and gadfly, calls Dediu one of “the most perceptive commentators outside of Apple itself.”) That it came from this unlikely source illustrates how resistant the transportation world is to innovation; after all, we largely move around using technology invented in the 19th century. And that, in turn, demonstrates how it could be outflanked by disruptive start-up culture.

Dediu, who now divides his time between the U.S. and Finland, speaks with the hypercaffeinated brio of someone typically paid to offer his thoughts. He peppers his discourse with pitch-deck aphorisms, like “maps are the browsers of micromobility” and “humility is the best business model.” In recent years, he’s become an active promoter of the micromobility movement, hosting conferences in the U.S. and Europe as the co-founder of Micromobility Industries. (The company also publishes Ride Reviews, a roundup of micromobility options ranging from $300 hoverboards to a nearly $30,000 three-wheeled electric “autocycle.”) He’s taken his micromobility pitch to the halls of Congress.

It’s not his first career turn. Dediu — Romanian-born, U.S.-raised and -educated — worked in the 1990s as a member of the technical staff for telecom companies like GTE Labs. While there, he had a startling realization. “I didn’t understand what the stock price of GTE meant,” he says. “I was never educated about it.” He soon found himself studying product development at Harvard Business School. Coming from the world of math and science, he was struck by the discipline’s reliance on case studies and stories — “like going back in prehistory and sitting around the campfire” — rather than data and formulas. He found himself drawn instead to the work of Clayton Christensen, the celebrated author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and architect of the theory of disruption, which was inspiring a generation of technology start-ups.

In 2000, after dabbling in the start-up world himself — work that he says “convinced me that phones would be the primary media consumer device” — he joined Nokia, then the world’s mobile heavyweight, as an analyst. He speaks fondly of his nine years with the company. “I learned everything about the mobile industry; I kind of rejoined European life — and I met my wife and had a son.” But he found himself disillusioned by the company’s response to the iPhone and left. “Nokia was not anticipating the transition [to smartphones] as rapidly and profoundly as I had anticipated,” he says.

Dediu joined Christensen as a fellow at his institute. One of Christensen’s key tenets holds that incumbent companies, by focusing on profitable higher-end products and sectors, leave an opportunity for disruptive start-ups, which enter the market with cheaper, but functional, alternatives, eventually challenging the incumbents as their own offerings improve. And so cheap digital cameras replaced camcorders, tinny MP3s replaced CDs, and — as Dediu predicted — in countries around the world, smartphones replaced laptops (he explained the “iPhone anomaly” of a “high-end product disruption” by “framing it not as an expensive phone but a cheap computer”).

Disruption proved a powerful lens to explain what had already happened in Silicon Valley. But Christensen and Dediu wanted to see if they could use it to forecast the future. Dediu suggested looking at ways that disruption could remake the energy market, an increasingly discussed topic as the world verged toward climate crisis. First, he looked at industrial use, a major component of the grid, but change there was more likely to come through regulatory channels than wholesale disruption. Transportation, by contrast, which accounts for roughly a third of global energy consumption, would require hundreds of millions of consumers to change their behaviors. Only true disruption could affect change like that.

But where could that disruptive change come from? Dediu struggled for three years to find the answer. The automobile industry was uniquely resistant to disruption. Seemingly disruptive manufacturers like Tesla were, according to Christensen’s theory, an example of “sustaining” innovation — i.e., an improvement to existing technology, not a cheaper alternative to it. And anyway, Dediu was bearish on the shift to electric vehicles as a solution. “You start adding up how long that’s going to take,” he says. “There’s a global fleet of 1.4 billion vehicles that have to be converted.” Not that an all-electric fleet is a panacea. “We can’t build two billion electric cars without an impact on carbon; we can’t operate two billion cars without an impact.”

And then one afternoon, while riding an e-bike for the first time, he had a revelation. Could this be the bottom-up disruption he’d been looking for? He went looking for information — how many people owned e-bikes, how often they rode them, where and how they rode them. “There was no data,” he says. So he started looking for similar vehicles that he could study. He wondered: What else is small with an electric motor? “I found it’s hundreds of other things — hoverboards and boosted boards and e-kick scooters and bikes in China with crummy lead-acid batteries.” It was a huge, vaporous market. “There’s all these small vehicles all over the world, literally hundreds of millions, and nobody’s counting them, nobody’s measuring how many miles [they travel], what’s their impact on carbon, are they being shared, what’s the supply chain, what’s the time to market — nothing. I spent three years working my ass off trying to figure out automobility and realized that’s actually the tail wagging the dog,” he says. “There’s more people in the world caring about two wheels than there are four.”

In other words, to paraphrase another Christensen tenet, just because no one’s measuring something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. “I was fooled because I didn’t see this, and it’s right under my nose,” he says. Part of the problem was nomenclature. What Europe called a quadricycle might be a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle in the U.S. and something else in China. “I thought: If we just give a name to everything that’s a non-car, we can start to identify their existence,” he says. “My contribution was to give a name to negative space.” And so micromobility — anything under 500 kg that has a motor or is self-powered and moves, but isn’t a car — was born.

Perhaps it wasn’t so strange an insight from a technology analyst. The iPhone and its ilk proved that, most of the time, we don’t need full-powered desktop computers; a pocket device that could do many of the same things was usually more than enough. Dediu was asking, Could transportation go through the same change? Why take an SUV, and all its inefficient weight, on short trips when a much smaller vehicle — powered by a battery the size you’d find in a home drill — could do the same job, at almost zero cost? The car, he says, is a “bundle” we buy — like a cable television package with endless stations we never watch — filled with all kinds of unused capacity.

Dediu suggests that the still-early days of micromobility resemble the nascent period of another transportation innovation: the car itself. “It had no infrastructure, laws were passed against it, it was considered extremely unsafe, it was hard to use, there were no standards,” he says — all charges that have been leveled against micromobility. The micromobility revolution won’t happen overnight, but disruptive change rarely does. Even Dediu’s beloved smartphone took years to emerge as a true laptop alternative for much of the planet. “The hell that I went through trying to convince people that smartphones were the future,” Dediu says. “It took decades — and now it’s so boring and uninteresting.”

Tom Vanderbilt is the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) and Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. His writing has appeared in Outside, WIRED, Slate, and many other publications.

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