Innovation is something that most organizations strive for, and as such, there have been various attempts to understand what makes someone innovative and whether there are particular characteristics that mark someone out as innovative.
These usually involve things like being open to new experiences, curious about the world and a perseverance in seeing things through despite adverse circumstances.
The innovators DNA
A recent study from a team at Louisiana Tech University looked at innovators in an academic environment to see just how accurate these heuristics were.
The paper looks at patent records over a 23 year period and finds that so called ‘serial inventors’ have an outsized impact on innovation in our universities.
“We were interested in determining if like ‘serial entrepreneurs’ there are ‘serial inventors,’ and quantifying what percentage of the total inventors they make up,” the authors say. “There have been many studies published about serial entrepreneurs, but fewer about serial inventors. For the purposes of their research, we defined an ‘inventor’ as a person who has been granted a US patent.”
For the purposes of the research, inventor was distinguished from other researchers that may have worked on the project but not actually obtained a patent for it. For instance, they accept that not all innovations are patentable, or even commercializable, so patent protection isn’t a suitable course of action for all research.
The Pareto of innovation
Of course, the Pareto principle is well known, and it’s been shown in things ranging from open innovation to Wikipedia, from citizen science to crowdfunding, that if you analyze a crowd of people, there will be a small minority that perform the bulk of the work.
This study supports that hypothesis, and reveals that the bulk of the patents produced by a university are done by a relatively small number of researchers.
“Approximately 10 percent of faculty inventors account for about 50 percent of the patents generated at a university,” they say. “Particularly striking was that this percentage was identical among all five major universities studies, indicating it may be a universal fact. We also found this to be true here at Louisiana Tech as well.”
“We also believe that the success of these highly creative and productive individuals is due in large part to their success in building and sustaining productive research groups. Key is their ability to obtain funding for their research projects from sponsors,” they continue.
This was reflected in a recent report that looked at how researchers spend their time. It found that they’re spending less time on commercial activities compared to a few years ago, but that output has actually increased, suggesting perhaps that it is the best researchers that are actually maintaining innovative work.
The American study does however remind us that in uncertain times, it can’t be taken for granted that it’s the best performers that will continue innovating, and that should they leave, the fall in innovative productivity could be dramatic.
“There is a competition among universities for these serial inventors and ‘star’ faculty, and we could be in danger of losing them to other states if we do not invest in higher education. This loss of key innovators could have long lasting negatives effects on our economic development efforts,” they conclude.
