On the Science of Breakthroughs

Saw a number of cases of this in the enterprise.   Ownership often misplaced.

The Science of Breakthroughs: What Holds Some Ideas Back?

 Podcast and discussion transcript

Wharton's Anoop Menon discusses his research on why some research breakthroughs take off while others languish in the background.

Why do some scientific breakthroughs take off while others languish in the shadows? In their paper, “Breakthrough Recognition: Competing for Attention,” Wharton management professor Anoop Menon and Sen Chai, a management professor at ESSEC Business School in France, analyzed more than 5.3 million research papers published in the life sciences between 1970-1999 to see what might be hindering some ideas from gaining wider recognition. Menon recently sat down with Knowledge@Wharton to discuss their findings. (Listen to the podcast using the player above.)

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: You have some previous research that looks at the nature of breakthroughs in the space industry. This latest paper looks more at research in the life sciences. What was the inspiration for this paper?

Anoop Menon: The inspiration comes from the observation that time and time again, we see great, really novel ideas come out in terms of just the raw quality of the idea. But then nobody picks it up. It makes no impact, no splash. It just gets lost….

My co-author, Sen Chai, who’s a professor at ESSEC, Business School in France, and I were really fascinated by that question. Why do some ideas get picked up while others do not, even if the quality is very comparable? So that’s what got us started.

And within that stream, [we focused] on the spread and recognition of idea, not the creation. That was the starting point.  .... "