Victor Hugo famously remarked that there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. It’s a remark that highlights the considerable environmental factors that go into the success of any idea. Yet, when we think of innovation, we often think of the lone genius who brings their idea to fruition through the magic cocktail of inspiration and perspiration.
It’s a notion that suggests that there is something unique about that person that allows their innovation to thrive, and therefore no other person could possibly come up with similar ideas at the same time. It’s a concept that is dispelled in new research from INSEAD, which proposes something they refer to as “idea twins”, which emerge when time and culture combine in a way that brings innovations to the fore.
Of course, that’s not to say that both “twins” have the same level of exposure or success, as while we’ve all heard of Alexander Bell, far fewer have heard of Elisha Gray, despite both disclosing their inventions on the same day. The research explores what it is that sets both inventors apart, and indeed what conditions helped them to devise such similar innovations at the same time.
Idea twins
The study outlines a new way to find idea twins in everyday life, which, just as with human twins, could give us valuable insight into why some ideas work and some don’t. The research trawled through the research literature to look for instances whereby two papers shared the credit for the same discovery. In total, nearly 11,000 such pairs were identified, with the full dataset made publicly available.
Twins were identified using a range of metrics, including semantic similarity, co-citation, and back-to-back publication. The paper highlights how, as with human twins, idea twins are also prone to have more similarities in certain instances than others.
Suffice to say, whereas idea twins are to a large extent permitted in the scientific world, the technological world tends to be governed by a patent system that awards all the fruits to the first past the post. If idea twins are as prominent in the technological world as in the scientific world, it suggests that many people are missing out due to the vagaries of the patent system.
We traditionally view creativity in terms of its originality, but the apparent frequency of idea twins reminds us that this may not be a helpful perspective to take, with the most well-publicized ideas simply being the first rather than the most original ideas.
