Michael, your work is on the ways in which new knowledge – including especially scientific advances – can become the source of competitive advantage.     What have you found on this? 

Michael studies ideas:  whether they get used or not.  Think of ideas as at the core of scientific breakthroughs like natural selection, calculus, EPOs, and AI.  Why do we associate these with Darwin, Newton, Amgen, and DeepMind rather than Wallace, Leibniz, Goldwasser, and Decartes?   Good ideas don’t always spread – at least not when they are initially introduced.  What are the conditions under which uptake occurs both as a function of their expression and of context?

There are implications of this for our profession, of course.  Why do we count patents as if they are fungible, when the point of a patent is to reward breakthrough innovation?  What are citations to patents actually measuring?  Michael’s research suggests that the answer is credit, not necessarily novelty.

What’s an “idea twin”?

Michael’s research identifies idea twins as the conferring of credit through citations to innovators that are often cited together.   He tells the story of how he developed his interest in this topic, which was at the core of his dissertation.  He was deeply inspired by the work of his advisor, Fiona Murray, on patent-paper pairs, and motivated by the confidence of his advisor, Scott Stern.   The finding is that, every time that a scientist cites something, it’s a “vote” on what someone things about who should get credit for an innovation.  Susan Couzzen’s dissertation on opiate receptors pointed to the importance of citations as allocations of credit.   One of Michael’s Eureka moments was to think of competition between idea twins as centered around the allocation of credit.

How about context?

We do not know enough about this.   The Eureka moment – the zeitgeist – means that time is right for an idea.   Michael is trouble when ideas are ignored.  The truth is that context matters, and we do not know a lot how context enables recognition of an idea.  There’s a gap between how we measure idea impact vs. how managers talk about the right time to invest in an innovation.

You have a great new paper on misfits.  An example you’ve described involves the tracks of music on an album that don’t quite fit with the others.   Can you explain your research in this area, and what you found?

The finding here is really interesting.   A misfit track on an album – in combination with more familiar types of tracks – gets more attention than a misfit on its own.   There’s an interesting psychological effect here that we need to understand more fully as it suggests that the uptake of innovations may be amplified when the new thing is connected to established things.  This may open the door toward understanding how context and novelty interact.

What makes you optimistic?

In many corners these days, a sense of doom prevails around us.   We are in a new world in many ways.  Yet I feel lucky to have been born in a time and place where Im able to do work on things that are fascinating.  As someone interested in innovation as a time of intense change, we also face opportunity to create something better. It’s scary.  But it’s compelling and critically important.