Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Science. 2013 Oct 25;342(6157):468-72. doi: 10.1126/science.1240474.
Novelty is an essential feature of creative ideas, yet the building blocks of new ideas are often embodied in existing knowledge. From this perspective, balancing atypical knowledge with conventional knowledge may be critical to the link between innovativeness and impact. Our analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests that science follows a nearly universal pattern: The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations. Papers of this type were twice as likely to be highly cited works. Novel combinations of prior work are rare, yet teams are 37.7% more likely than solo authors to insert novel combinations into familiar knowledge domains.
新颖性是创意的一个基本特征，但新想法的基础往往体现在现有知识中。从这个角度来看，平衡非典型知识和常规知识对于创新性和影响力之间的联系可能至关重要。我们对涵盖所有科学领域的 1790 万篇论文进行的分析表明，科学遵循一种近乎普遍的模式：最具影响力的科学主要基于先前工作中异常常规的组合，但同时也具有不寻常组合的入侵。这类论文成为高引用论文的可能性是两倍。先前工作的新颖组合很少见，但团队将新颖组合插入熟悉的知识领域的可能性比单独作者高 37.7%。
