When
scientists studying milk production faced technical obstacles, they
began exploring whether goats could lactate the proteins used in spider
silk – one of the strongest materials on Earth. The resulting product,
BioSteel, drew interest and funding from the U.S. military, which wanted
to use the woven fabric for bulletproof vests.
It may seem like
an unlikely path to innovation, but according to new Cornell-led
research, it’s a remarkably typical tale. Reliance on scientific
reasoning, cross-disciplinary collaboration and long research paths – in
which the next step seems unfathomable to most observers – are three
traits often leading to “big-leap” inventions, the study found.
“The biggest ideas – the biggest solutions – exist further away from what we already know,” said Madeline Kneeland, assistant professor in the School of Hotel Administration and first author of “Exploring Uncharted Territory: Knowledge Search Processes in the Origination of Outlier Innovation,” which published April 1 in Organization Science.
“If
we want to encourage this type of behavior, either among individuals or
organizations, we need to understand the circumstances that allows some
people to make these big-leap innovations,” Kneeland said. “The purpose
of this paper was to lay a framework for thinking about the ways in
which this exploration happens.”
Kneeland and collaborators
analyzed the 1.5 million patent applications approved by the U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office from 1990 to 2000. They used a new computational
method to identify the 120,000 patents that jumped at least two
technological steps beyond previous research. They then interviewed
inventors of nine of the most distant outliers – the patents that took
the longest leaps from existing knowledge.
The interviews revealed
several examples of long search paths, such as the one that took the
inventors of BioSteel from mammary glands to bulletproof clothing.
“If
you think about how some people get from point A to point B, they’re
following a trail of ideas that may be quite distant from the way most
of us tend to understand the world,” Kneeland said. “But the people
following it see a clear path forward, and follow an unusual trail that
is actually pretty far away from where they started, or from what we
already know.”
Searching archival patent records, the researchers
found that creators of big-jump inventions were more likely than
creators of incremental new technology to cite scientific articles in
their patents, and were more likely to be assigned to a university.
“A
scientific theory or model may give us insight into solutions that
ought to work, even if nothing proximate to that solution has ever been
tried before,” the researchers wrote. Albert Einstein’s General Theory
of Relativity, for instance, made predictions that relied on general
reasonings about light rather than prior work, they said.
The
third factor the researchers explored was what they called “distant
recombination” – an individual or team that brings together disparate
fields of knowledge. Teams where people have wide-ranging specialties
are more likely to inspire unlikely inventions, the study found –
especially when individuals on the team have expertise in more than one
field.
For example, the PillCam – a tiny video camera that can be
swallowed to view the intestines – was invented by a gastroenterologist
working with an electro-optical engineer developing guided missiles for
the Israeli military.
The researchers identified distant
recombination by looking at inventors’ previous patenting history, and
the different fields where they’d previously worked. Of the three
factors they explored, distant recombination was most strongly
associated with big-leap innovation, Kneeland said.
The study also
considered the role of serendipity – exploring how long search paths,
scientific reasoning or distant recombination might help inventors make
the most of a chance discovery.
“Some inventions do seem to
materialize out of thin air,” Kneeland said. “But that’s not really a
process you can encourage or teach.”
The paper was co-authored
with Melissa Schilling of New York University’s Stern School of Business
and Barak Aharonson of the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv
University.
