An old divide in the study of innovation is whether ideas come primarily from individual/group creativity, or whether they are “in the air”, so that anyone with the right set of background knowledge will be able to see them. In this episode, I look at how much redundancy there is in innovation: if the discoverer of some idea had failed to find it, would someone else have figured it out later?
This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial draft of the) post How common is independent discovery?, originally published on New Things Under the Sun.
Articles Mentioned:
Ogburn, William F., and Dorothy Thomas. 1922. Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution. Political Science Quarterly 37(1): 83-98. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2142320
Haagstrom, Warren O. 1974. Competition in Science. American Sociological Review 39(1): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.2307/2094272
Hill, Ryan, and Carolyn Stein. 2020. Scooped! Estimating Rewards for Priority in Science. Working Paper.
Painter, Deryc T., Frank van der Wouden, Manfred D. Laubichler, and Hyejin Youn. 2020. Quantifying simultaneous innovations in evolutionary medicine. Theory in Biosciences 139: 319-335. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-020-00333-3
Bikard, Michaël. 2020. Idea Twins: Simultaneous discoveries as a research tool. Strategic Management Journal 41(8): 1528-1543. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3162
Ganguli, Ina, Jeffrey Lin, and Nicholas Reynolds. 2020. The Paper Trail of Knowledge Spillovers: Evidence from Patent Interferences. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 12(2): 278-302. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20180017
Lück, Sonja, Benjamin Balmier, Florian Seliger, and Lee Fleming. 2020. Early Disclosure of Invention and Reduced Duplication: An Empirical Test. Management Science 66(6): 2677-2685. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2019.3521
Iaria, Alessandro, Carlo Schwarz, and Fabian Waldinger. 2018. Frontier Knowledge and Scientific Production: Evidence from the Collapse of International Science. Quarterly Journal of Economics: 927-991. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx046
Borjas, George J., and Kirk B. Doran. 2012. The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 127(3): 1143-1203. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjs015
Hill, Ryan, and Carolyn Stein. 2021. Race to the bottom: competition and quality in science. Working paper.
Cotropia, Christopher Anthony, and David L. Schwartz. 2018. Patents Used in Patent Office Rejections as Indicators of Value. SSRN Working Paper https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3274995