Relying on recent and temporally dispersed science predicts breakthrough inventions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ke, Qing, Teng, Ziyou, Min, Chao
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2021
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author Ke, Qing
Teng, Ziyou
Min, Chao
author_facet Ke, Qing
Teng, Ziyou
Min, Chao
contents The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance implications. One such feature that has received much attention is technological knowledge age. Yet, little is known about how the age of scientific knowledge influences the impact of inventions, despite the widely known catalyzing role of science in the creation of new technologies. Here we use a large corpus of patents and derive features characterizing how patents temporally search in the scientific space. We find that patents that cite scientific papers have more citations and substantially more likely to become breakthroughs. Conditional on searching in the scientific space, referencing more recent papers increases the impact of patents and the likelihood of being breakthroughs. However, this positive effect can be offset if patents cite papers whose ages exhibit a low variance. These effects are consistent across technological fields.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2107_09176
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Relying on recent and temporally dispersed science predicts breakthrough inventions
Ke, Qing
Teng, Ziyou
Min, Chao
Digital Libraries
Computers and Society
The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance implications. One such feature that has received much attention is technological knowledge age. Yet, little is known about how the age of scientific knowledge influences the impact of inventions, despite the widely known catalyzing role of science in the creation of new technologies. Here we use a large corpus of patents and derive features characterizing how patents temporally search in the scientific space. We find that patents that cite scientific papers have more citations and substantially more likely to become breakthroughs. Conditional on searching in the scientific space, referencing more recent papers increases the impact of patents and the likelihood of being breakthroughs. However, this positive effect can be offset if patents cite papers whose ages exhibit a low variance. These effects are consistent across technological fields.
title Relying on recent and temporally dispersed science predicts breakthrough inventions
topic Digital Libraries
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09176