Technological search strategy and breakthrough innovation: An integrated approach based on main-path analysis

The significance of breakthrough innovations is not only reflected in their technological novelty but also in their impacts on the evolution of industrial technology paths. In the context of accelerating digitalization and industrial upgrading, it is particularly important to investigate how can firms manage their technological search strategies to generate breakthrough outputs. We develop a main-path-based approach to complement the existing method of breakthrough innovations in terms of their impact on industrial technology evolution. Besides, based on a sample of 29,620 USPTO patents of the electric communication industry, for the period 1976–2021, we further link firms' technological search strategies of local and distant modes to their breakthrough innovation and find that the two search modes have respective and joint effects on firms' breakthrough performance concerning both technological novelty and industrial impact. This paper not only provides a more integrated approach to identifying breakthrough innovations but also explores the impact of a firm's technological search strategy on them.