(September 29, 2015) Most
high-impact innovation happens when knowledge and people from different fields
are brought together to create something new, previous research has found.
But the latest findings from the University of Toronto's
Rotman School of Management show that truly new, paradigm-busting ideas with
long-term potential need profound knowledge in a narrow domain. Organizations that ignore that in favour of
recombining what's already known will miss out on the greatest potential
breakthroughs.
Recombining existing knowledge "is only one piece of
the puzzle," says Sarah Kaplan, a Rotman professor of strategic management
who has co-written a study paper on the subject with Keyvan Vakili, an
assistant professor at the London Business School, who is a graduate of the
Rotman PhD program.
Previous research has measured levels of innovation by
looking at how frequently a patent is cited in subsequent patent registrations.
That measures the idea's economic usefulness, but not how truly new the idea
is, say the current study's researchers.
Instead, they looked for cases where new language and terms
were brought into patent Information, signalling the introduction of completely
new ideas. Creating a novelty of their own, they adapted a computer science
text analysis technique called "topic modelling," for their analysis.
They applied it to patents over a 20-year period in a branch of nanotechnology
called “buckminsterfullerenes”.