Elsevier

Research Policy

Volume 51, Issue 1, January 2022, 104376
Research Policy

Breakthrough innovations and where to find them

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2021.104376Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • We identify breakthroughs on a large scale starting from awarded innovations.

  • The methodology is flexible and replicable in other contexts.

  • For the period 1976–2013 in a sample of 138,467 patents, we find 17,176 breakthroughs.

  • Relevant robustness checks support the validity of our classification.

  • We exploit this sample to re-examine the sources of breakthrough innovations.

Abstract

Breakthrough innovations significantly depart from common practices and can potentially reshape existing markets, create new markets, and prompt the emergence of new technological trajectories. The crucial role that breakthrough innovations play in technological progress has stimulated a lively line of research investigating methods to identify them in actual empirical contexts. Despite this ongoing effort, the availability of data on breakthrough innovations is still scarce and seems to have prevented, at least so far, an integrated perspective comprising both their technical and economic significance. We address this limitation by developing a method that uses award-winning innovations which have been successfully commercialized to find breakthrough patents on a large scale. For the period 1976–2013, in a sample of 138,467 USPTO patents, we identify 17,176 breakthrough innovations. Relevant robustness checks support the validity of our classification. We then exploit this sample to assess the sources of breakthrough innovations.

Keywords

Breakthrough Innovations
Queen's Awards
Patent Value

JEL codes

O31,O32,O33

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