Search Efforts, Selective Appropriation, and the Usefulness of New Knowledge: Evidence from a Comparison Across U.S. and Non-U.S. Patent Applicants

Theory And Hypothesis

The new combination is a hallmark of novelty creation (Schumpeter, 1934). Favorable innovation performance can be expected to the extent that new ways to effectively combine hitherto uncombined components are identified. One effective strategy to achieve such a new combination is increasing the degree of diversity in combined components, including raw material, products, and knowledge. New knowledge is often generated by recombining extant knowledge. Accordingly, it is expected that diversity in such antecedent knowledge positively influences resultant new knowledge. As such, prior research focuses on characteristics of recombined knowledge components per se as possible determinants of resultant new knowledge’s usefulness. The key question asked has been what type of knowledge components selection can be best recombined to generate useful new knowledge. Such knowledge recombination characteristics like diversity in technological classes or diversity in external knowledge sources have been extensively analyzed (Benner & Tushman, 2002; Rosenkopf & Nerkar, 2001; Sørensen & Stuart, 2000).