HOI research | The key to impact lies in understanding the full history of past inventions
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Why inventors should look back before moving forward
Innovation is never starting from scratch—it’s built on what came before. Analyzing nearly 20,000 nuclear energy patents, this study explores how inventors choose which ideas to build on: refine what they know or borrow from other fields?
While both paths matter, the real game-changer is something deeper—trajectory integration, the insight that real innovation comes from understanding an invention’s full history, not just referencing its most recent version.
Think of designing a new iPhone: if you only look at the last model, you risk repeating mistakes or missing what truly defines the iPhone’s evolution. Earlier versions introduced key features like the App Store, Face ID, and multi-touch gestures—foundational steps that shaped how users interact with the device. The same goes for electric vehicles: understanding how battery performance, charging infrastructure, and consumer expectations have evolved over time is essential to pushing the next generation forward — because ignoring that history means missing the logic behind the design.
In fact, what matters isn’t just whether ideas come from inside or outside a field—those are simply different trajectories. What sets impactful inventors apart is how well they integrate the full arc of those trajectories.
“One of the trickiest parts of this research was getting beyond the usual question of ‘where do inventors find their ideas?’,” says researcher Holmer Kok. “We realized that the real insight wasn’t about whether an idea comes from inside or outside a field, but whether the inventor truly understands and integrates the invention’s past—its full lineage.”
A new way forward for innovation research
This study shifts the conversation about innovation. Instead of just asking where inventors get their ideas from, it pushes us to ask how deeply they understand the history behind those ideas. Are they building on the whole story, or just the latest version?
For companies and inventors, this means tracing the full arc of a technology’s development—not just what’s new, but how it got there. For funders and research institutions, it suggests supporting this kind of historical depth, not just cross-field exploration. And future research could reveal which industries gain most from trajectory integration—what works in medicine might not work the same in tech.
Key research findings
- Inventions that build on a chain of earlier developments in the same field tend to be more influential within that field, but less influential outside it.
- The most impactful inventions build on sequences of inventions from outside the field.
Meet the researchers
- Holmer Kok: Assistant Professor, House of Innovation, Stockholm School of Economics
- Joseph Monroe, General Dynamics Land Systems Canada, Innovation Cell
- Philip Kappen, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Industrial Economics and Management
