Essays on the sources and value of technological novelty.

This PhD dissertation investigates the sources of novel technologies and of their value. Novel technologies satisfy human needs in unprecedented ways (often involving new principles, applications and/or combinations of components). They hold great promise but also high risk; the vast majority are worthless, while a select few have a rather disproportionate value and impact on subsequent technological development. Given their substantial⁠—though rather elusive⁠—value, understanding their sources and their contribution to private and social value is important for societal advance and merits the interest of policymakers, researchers and practitioners alike . This PhD provides new insights on (i) the incentives and capabilities of innovative firms for producing novel and commercially valuable technologies; (ii) the relation between the knowledge of individual inventors and the novelty and value of their inventions; and (iii) the characteristics of novel technologies that improve their commercial impact. For each of these topics, this dissertation presents new empirical evidence that focuses, respectively, on innovating firms, individual inventors and technologies themselves. The empirical analyses rely on novel large-scale data on patented inventions, introducing new constructs and measures to the literature; this allows to examine the aforementioned relationships accounting for the vast heterogeneity across inventions, inventors, firms and technological domains. For innovation scholars, this dissertation provides answers to questions, old and new, relating to the characteristics of organizations and individuals that facilitate the creation of (valuable) technological novetly, as well as provides new constructs and measures that can be further explored for use in subsequent research. For innovation policymakers and practitioners, these results may be used to derive interventions to stimulate the development of more novel, and commercially viable, technologies.status: publishe