Breakthroughs need expertise, not just cross-collaboration

Most high-impact innovation happens when knowledge and people from different fields are brought together to create something new, previous research has found. But the latest findings from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management show that truly new, paradigm-busting ideas with long-term potential need profound knowledge in a narrow domain.

Organisations that ignore that in favour of recombining what's known will miss out on the greatest potential breakthroughs. Previous research has measured innovation by looking at how frequently a patent is cited in subsequent patent registrations.

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That measures the idea's economic usefulness, but not how truly new the idea is, say the current study's researchers - Sarah Kaplan, a Rotman professor of strategic management, and Keyvan Vakili, an assistant professor at the London Business School.

Besides finding that patents exhibiting true novelty were associated with a greater depth of subject knowledge, the researchers found that it was rare for a patent to feature both novelty and economic usefulness. Only one per cent of all patents in their sample hit the mark on both scores.