Overview
How do firms use technological breakthroughs to move beyond their own inventive experience and toward areas of strength for other firms?
We examine inventive search through which firms move beyond their own prior inventive activity and toward knowledge domains more closely associated with other firms. We call this movement search incursion. Generative inventions make previously infeasible combinations of knowledge possible and can weaken the conditions protecting other firms' advantages. Technological proximity shapes both a firm's ability to use an invention and its exposure to the changes that adoption requires. Using patent data, we examine how the likelihood of search incursion varies with technological proximity and the structure of the firm's knowledge base.
The study
The study draws on 5.87 million patents and examines firms citing 5,548 generative inventions. Among these firms, incursions are most common when prior inventions are moderately related to the breakthrough. Text reviews conducted without access to the measure's score or classification check the search-incursion measure.
