 (Un)conventional combinations: At the origins of breakthrough inventionsAntonio Della Malva and Massimo Riccaboni () No 497108, Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven Abstract: Impactful inventions carry forward combinations of components which depart from common practices: they remove restrictions in the knowledge space by breaking conventional rules. In this paper we present a novel measure of the extent to which combinations in the inventive process conform to established practices. We borrow an established approach from the literature on product market diversification and adapt it to measure how combinations are typical or unconventional. We find that most of the inventive activities are grounded in conventional efforts, with rare instances of unconventional connections. Unconventionality is more likely to occur with experience, in teams and in large organizations. Moreover, patents which cite a widespread spectrum of previous results have a higher chance to identify unconventional connections. We also observe that inventions carrying forward unconventional combinations are cited more by future patent applications than conventional inventions. Date: 2015-05 Published in FEB Research Report Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ete:msiper:497108 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven |
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