(The) impact of typicality on invention performance: a study on the significance of search target combinations

Abstract

Inventions contain incomplete information of its constituent technological components. However, limited amount of existing work examine the firm search's way of search to find required information from existing inventions. This paper is theoretically motivated from the idea that there exists conventional and atypical combination of knowledge. In particular, this paper explores a way of search as an antecedent of invention performance, and typicality is defined as a way of search which reuses past search target combinations. The association between typicality and expected invention performance is studied further upon two distinct inventive achievements. Based on the U.S. semiconductor patents between 1947 and 2020, it is demonstrated that inventions with high typicality are associated with more high-impact breakthroughs and less path-breaking novelties. Findings in this research reaffirms the importance of examining search targets in context of other search targets that are searched together to create an invention.