Essays on Inventions

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2020Inventions help individuals and firms to grow, compete, and survive in the marketplace. The context in which inventions are created can shape the nature and purpose of the invention. This dissertation examines how inventions can be created to solve problems and to spark new technological paradigms. In my first essay, I consider how firms respond to unanticipated performance setbacks and whether their deviation from their routine search, toward either riskier or more conservative problemistic search, is contingent on the societal context in which they are embedded. I find that, when Japanese and South Korean automotive firms experienced involuntary product recalls, they tended to become increasingly conservative in accordance with the general aversion of risk within their societies; subsequent technical solutions in the affected technological space relied less on external technologies than on those derived prior to the recall. In contrast, U.S. automotive firms deviated relatively little from their routine search patterns in response to product recalls. My post hoc analyses finds that those firms that pursued riskier resolutions to their involuntary recalls by relying increasingly on external technologies were more likely to experience subsequent recalls. Firms that took a more conservative stance by relying on internal technologies, however, prevented subsequent recalls. My analyses suggest that societal norms may influence how effectively firms adapt to performance setbacks. In my second essay, I pivot my focus from the firm to the individual inventor. Research on knowledge creation produces conflicting conclusions about who creates breakthroughs: are they broadly knowledgeable dabblers, or are they highly specialized experts? I resolve this tension by applying natural language processing to identify and classify breakthrough technologies, parsing the abstracts of 5.5 million U.S. patents between 1969-2017. I make two main contributions. First, I explore the experience of inventors to determine whether broad or focused experience is more conducive to creating breakthroughs. Second, I use topic modelling to isolate these breakthroughs that shift the technological paradigms and establish new vocabularies and cognitive maps