Combining knowledge to generate novelty: a study of disclosed ideas for life science inventions
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a combination of diverse sources of knowledge is important for generation of new ideas and address how institutional infrastructures and practices support integration of knowledge across organizations in medicine and life sciences.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper investigates new product ideas that emerge from hospital and university employees, and looks at the extent of interaction between clinical and scientific environments in the idea generation process. The paper utilizes data about all new product ideas within life science that were reported in South-Eastern Norway in 2009-2011, as well as information about the individuals and teams that had been involved in disclosing these ideas. Interviews with inventors have also been carried out.
Findings
Interaction and integration across scientific and clinical domains are common and important for generating new product ideas. More than half of the disclosed life science ideas in the database come from groups representing multiple institutions with both scientific and clinical units or from individuals with multiple institutional affiliations. The interviews indicate that the infrastructure for cross-domain interaction is well-developed, particularly for research activities, which has a positive effect on invention.
Originality/value
The paper uses an original data set of invention disclosures and investigates the hospital-science interface, which is a novel setting for studies of inventive activities.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This paper is based on the STILS research project funded by a grant from the Norwegian Research Council, under the program activity FORFI, and a grant from the Health Region South-East in Norway. Their financial support is gratefully acknowledged. The authors also would like to thank Inven2 for supplying data, Ole Kristian Berggren for additional assistance in collecting data and all the informants that took part in the interview study. The insightful comments made by the participants at the annual WOMI workshops and the reviewers and editors of EJIM are also acknowledged. Any mistakes and omissions remain the sole responsibility of the authors.
Citation
Thune, T. and Gulbrandsen, M. (2017), "Combining knowledge to generate novelty: a study of disclosed ideas for life science inventions", European Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. 20 No. 3, pp. 446-462. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJIM-11-2016-0114
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited