Impact of knowledge search practices on the originality of inventions: A study in the oil & gas industry through dynamic patent analysis

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing – Socrates

One of my Google Scholar alerts turned up a recent academic paper that may interest you and some of your colleagues.

The paper, titled “Impact of knowledge search practices on the originality of inventions: A study in the oil & gas industry through dynamic patent analysis,” notes that while oil & gas firms do lots of research, the money spent on R&D effort could be used more effectively.

The authors explore the ways in which enterprises, and the inventors within those enterprises, identify the information they need to create innovative solutions to problems faced by their firm. As the title implies, the oil & gas industry is used to illustrate the authors’ approach.

Within an enterprise, inventors may face obstacles to finding corporate knowledge within their own company, because of the structure of the internal knowledge base.

So how can the authors of this paper help you make better use of your R&D resources?

POSIT: You need to identify innovative solutions for the problems facing your enterprise.
QUESTION: What are the best search practices you can use to identify those solutions?
ANSWER: Take some time to read the following research article. It may offer some guidance.

The authors’ method combines interviews with patent analysis. Patent analysis is used as a proxy for knowledge components.

They identify four search approaches used by major oil firms:

(1) refinement, (2) clustering, (3) absorption and (4) recomposition

No matter which approach used by a particular firm, results can be improved by structuring the knowledge in such a way that the firm’s inventors can easily access all knowledge components they need to produce innovative solutions to the firm’s problems.

The paper is written by academics for an academic audience. As such, it is not easy reading. But I think you will find it worth your effort.

The abstract appears below, as does the URL for the free, full text of the paper.
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Impact of knowledge search practices on the originality of inventions: A study in the oil & gas industry through dynamic patent analysis
Quentin Plantec1,2, Pascal Le Masson1 & Benoît Weil1
1. MINES ParisTech, PSL University, Centre for Management Science (CGS), i3 UMR CNRS, 60 Boulevard St Michel, 75006 Paris, France1
2. Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle (INPI), 15 rue des Minimes, 92677 Courbevoie CEDEX, France
Free full text source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2021.120782
ABSTRACT:
The paper suggests a new taxonomy of knowledge search modes to describe the creative process of new invention design, in particular how firms combine knowledge components from their own knowledge base—taking into account both the components and the structures of knowledge bases—with those from newly acquired or newly internally developed. Using network theory techniques, we defined four knowledge search modes: (1) refinement, (2) clustering, (3) absorption and (4) recomposition. We conducted an exploratory study on the oil & gas industry, reviewing 50,776 utility patents filed by 16 major firms between 1989 and 2016. The results showed, first, that firms relied to varying extents on different knowledge search modes in their invention design processes. Second, reviewing the technological originality of the designed inventions showed that simply absorbing new knowledge components, without major changes in knowledge base structure, was associated with low technological originality, but constituted one of the main knowledge search modes used by the analyzed firms. In contrast, major changes in knowledge base structure favored technological originality, with or without new knowledge components, but were nevertheless the least used mode. Understanding organizational learning practices associated with the phenomena described here can foster innovation performance in firms.
HIGHLIGHTS:
Oil & gas firms are heterogeneous in their knowledge search practices for designing inventions.
Firm’s knowledge expertise should be bridged to design original inventions.
New knowledge not bridged with firm’s expertise negatively affect originality.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: We would like to thanks B. Cabanes (MINES ParisTech – PSL University), C. Sternberger (INPI), N. Sennequier (INPI), F. Caillaud (WIPO), C. Vahlibay (MINES ParisTech—PSL University), G. de Rassenfosse (EPFL), M. Wustmans (Bonn University), M. Chebre, J. Luo (IDC), S. Sarica (IDC) and the participants of the Data & Algorithms for Science, Technology and Innovation Studies Conference organized by EPO and KU Leuven for their useful insights in relation to this research project.
FUNDING: This work was supported by the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle (INPI) [collaborative Ph.D. (CIFRE scheme) grant number 2018/0255] and the Chair of Design Theory and Methods for Innovation (DTMI) of MINES ParisTech – PSL University.
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Jean Steinhardt served as Librarian, Aramco Services, Engineering Division, for 13 years. He now heads Jean Steinhardt Consulting LLC, producing the same high quality research that he performed for Aramco.

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