Breakthrough Innovations: their Origins, Diffusion and Appropriation.

The purpose of the proposed research is to use patent based indicators for measuring "breakthrough innovations" that can be applied on large scale samples. Breakthrough innovations are innovations that introduce new concepts that have the potential to generate new markets and through a mix of competitive and cooperative interactions, trigger follow-up innovations and growth in other firms. Constrained by the vague definition of the main concept, there is as yet no robust empirical evidence available that allows to draw generalizable conclusions on the contributions of breakthrough innovations. A first research area will be to detect the scientific background of breakthrough innovations. The question arises which research topics and fields are important sources and conveyers of information to be transformed to innovations that carry breakthrough characteristics. A next research question investigates the relationship between market structure and innovation. The questions we are interested in here are which type of company, is most likely to introduce breakthrough innovations and which role academic scientists have in introducing breakthrough innovations. A final set of questions deals with the diffusion of breakthrough innovations from whom is at the origin of the innovation to whom exploits and appropriates the returns from the innovation.

Keywords:Breakthrough Innovations, Technology Acquisition, Competition, Patents, Industry-Science Links Entrepreneurship, Small Business

Disciplines:Applied economics, Economic history, Macroeconomics and monetary economics, Microeconomics, Tourism