Which Discoveries Are Paradigm Shifting?
Provides a theoretically grounded metric for identifying paradigm shifts, relevant to innovation scholars and policymakers.
The authors propose a new measure that combines impact, novelty, and disruptiveness to identify paradigm-shifting discoveries, finding that these factors are strict complements (e.g., high impact cannot compensate for low novelty).
To better align theories of paradigm shifting discoveries and empirics identifying them, we pro-pose a novel measure that incorporates a discovery impact, novelty, and tendency to break with the past into a single, coherent measure. Calibration using the National Inventor Hall of Fame data reveals that impact, novelty, and disruptiveness are strict complements meaning, for example, that greater impact cannot substitute for moderate novelty. We illustrate the workings of the measure using data on USPTO patents from 1982 to 2015.