July 27th, 2021

this is more of an informal theory-building (in the m/Grounded Theory lite sense) than empirical findings per se, i think. and it says nothing about the extent to which these are the only or most important mechanisms for generating outlier innovations.

most interesting for us i think is the idea of long search paths, which they describe as an innovation that looks like a very large leap from previous ideas, but is actually composed of a lot of small(er) improvements that combine over time, and are known only to the inventor

also interesting is the idea of distant recombination, which feels like a mix of far conceptual combination and far analogies and outsider innovation, depending on the examples. don't find this to be particularly well theorized. but this connects very well to the way @uzziAtypicalCombinationsScientific2013 and @wangBiasNoveltyScience2017 think about things

two stories illustrate the idea of long search paths

definition of outliers: patents that, at the time of filing, were at least two steps away from all preexisting patents in terms of the USPTO mainline subclasses. used this technique to classify ~1.5M patents filed between 1990 and 2000, of which ~120k (~8%) were outlier patents by this definition.

definition of distant recombination: essentially the number of unique fields (per NBER 38 industry classifications) the inventor(s) (solo or team) had successfully patented within 10 years += year of application. collective breadth is total number of fields in the team, and max breadth is largest per-inventor count of fields.

estimation: logit (linear?) regression

• for inventor breadth of fields (additive effects on top of that for team breadth): [[EVD - patenting teams with a greater number of prior patenting fields were more likely to generate patents that were technological outliers - @kneelandExploringUnchartedTerritory2020]]

• for patenting experience

distant recombination measure makes me a bit grumpy: it's a diversity measure rather than a distance measure (which is how it's theorized)

correlation + natural experiment from unintended change in noncompete labor law

exploring new fields ++ novelty but --value (proxied with raw citations)

the relevance for our question here is that inventors who explore a new field (to the extent that it is different from their own) and then later go on to invent new things that are better are at least possibly (we don't know for sure) doing a form of far analogies or conceptual combination: tough to distinguish.

study 1: correlational study

study 2: natural experiment with michigan antitrust reform act

[[EVD - patents filed by inventors who was new to the patent's field tended to be more novel; this was less true if they collaborated with an expert in the new field - @artsParadiseNoveltyLoss2018a]]

[[EVD - patents filed by inventors who was new to the patent's field tended to receive slightly fewer citations, except when they collaborated with an expert in the new field - @artsParadiseNoveltyLoss2018a]]

there's also a result here that is similar to what @kneelandExploringUnchartedTerritory2020 finds re: science citations: positive effect of citing nonpatent prior art (mostly science pubs)

the results about expert collaborations in new fields reversing negative effects on forward citations (without canceling out novelty advantage) is really interesting and relevant for [[QUE - What are the most efficient routes to useful cross-boundary knowledge?]]

➰ breadcrumbs more citations for the outsider innovation effect, leaning a bit more on the "useful naivete" mechanism rather than "transferring in new things" piece