Emergence of Opportunity Creation: The case of pioneering technology

This paper investigates the antecedents of pioneering technologies; patents which do not have any prior patents or scientific publication as backward citations. We view these pioneering technologies as a case of creation (as opposed to discovery) opportunity. Following a cohort of inventors, we seek to understand the role of the inventor and their inventive experience as they create these nascent technological opportunities. We find that inventors generating zero-reference patents are not alert in an ex-ante manner as creation theory on opportunity predicts. In addition, their experience is more concentrated in a specific knowledge domain. For the comparison, we also test the impact of inventor’s experience at the context of average (in terms of the number of backward citations) and breakthrough patents. These findings indicate that creation theory on opportunities explains the emergence of pioneering technology while discovery theory on opportunities explains the emergence of average or breakthrough patents.