Fostering creativity through the exploitation of scientific and technological knowledge
研究发现，在锂电池等复杂科技领域，发明者利用自身积累的领域科技知识更能产生新颖且有价值的发明，挑战了以往认为新进入者更易突破的观点。
Abstract The most creative inventions—i.e., inventions that are both novel and highly valuable—in the lithium-ion battery field are developed by inventors that exploit their own field-specific knowledge base, leveraging scientific and technological knowledge components they previously developed. This observation contrasts with the findings of prior literature, which has argued that exploration driven by inventors new to a field tends to drive novel and breakthrough inventions. We argue that the technological context and characteristics of the recombinant search process underlying technology development provide important theoretical boundaries to these prior findings and should be considered. In a complex and science-driven technology field, we expect an inventor’s own accumulated scientific and technological field-specific knowledge base to play an important role in advancing that technology field and to matter more for generating novel and breakthrough inventions.