Fostering creativity through the exploitation of scientific and technological knowledge

The most creative inventions—i.e., inventions that are both novel and highly valuable—in the lithium-ion battery field are developed by inventors that exploit their own field-specific knowledge base, leveraging scientific and technological knowledge components they previously developed. This observation contrasts with the findings of prior literature, which has argued that exploration driven by inventors new to a field tends to drive novel and breakthrough inventions. We argue that the technological context and characteristics of the recombinant search process underlying technology development provide important theoretical boundaries to these prior findings and should be considered. In a complex and science-driven technology field, we expect an inventor’s own accumulated scientific and technological field-specific knowledge base to play an important role in advancing that technology field and to matter more for generating novel and breakthrough inventions.