Idea twins: Simultaneous discoveries as a research tool

• Published date: 01 August 2020
• Date: 01 August 2020
• Author: Michaël Bikard
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3162

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Idea twins: Simultaneous discoveries as a

research tool

Michaël Bikard

Strategy Department, INSEAD,

Fontainebleau, France

Correspondence

Michaël Bikard, Strategy Department,

INSEAD, Boulevard de Constance, 77300

Fontainebleau, France.

Email: michael.bikard@insead.edu

Funding information

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation;

LBS Institute of Innovation and

Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Research Summary: Over half a century after Mer-

ton's (1963) description of simultaneous discoveries “as

a strategic research site”for social science, they are

hardly ever studied. This paper illustrates the potential

of this phenomenon as a research tool. First, I describe

their vast theoretical potential for strategy and innova-

tion research and review prior works on the topic. Sec-

ond, I describe a new method that generates lists of

recent simultaneous discoveries in science systemati-

cally and automatically using openly available sources.

Third, I make the resulting dataset available for anyone

to use.

Managerial Summary: Despite much anecdotal evi-

dence that different people can simultaneously come

up with essentially the same creative idea, little atten-

tion has been given to this phenomenon. Yet, “idea

twins”have a deep impact on creative workers, and

can teach us a lot about strategy and innovation. In this

paper, I describe their potential as a research tool and

the types of questions they can help to answer. I also

propose a method to “harvest”simultaneous discover-

ies in science and provide a dataset that includes thou-

sands of examples.

KEYWORDS

creativity, innovation, paper twins, research tool, simultaneous

discoveries

Received: 14 November 2018 Revised: 7 February 2020 Accepted: 7 February 2020 Published on: 29 April 2020

DOI: 10.1002/smj.3162

1528 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strat Mgmt J. 2020;41:1528–1543.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/smj

1|INTRODUCTION

In 1858, Darwin and Wallace simultaneously published manuscripts describing the process

of evolution through natural selection. A few years later, in 1876, Alexander Bell and Elisha

Gray simultaneously announced the invention of the telephone to the U.S. patent office.

More recently, major breakthroughs such as the discovery of asymptotic freedom in quan-

tum chromodynamics (Politzer, 2005) and that of the CRISPR/Cas9 technology

(Lander, 2016) resulted from a series of findings that often emerged simultaneously from

different labs, raising important questions about the allocation of rewards. Whether in sci-

ence and technology (Hounshell, 1975; Merton, 1961), or even in the arts (McIntosh, 2018),

creative ideas are often not unique. Yet innovation scholars have largely ignored this

phenomenon.

I posit that simultaneous discoveries

1

constitute a useful—and hitherto underexploited—

research tool for innovation and strategy research, which makes it possible to investigate two

broad questions. First, what factors shape the exploitation of an innovation? The intrinsic

potential of innovative projects is generally unobservable, opening the door to various theories

and debates. As an example, differences in innovation outcomes may be driven by team size,

but also by differences in the intrinsic potential of the projects on which teams of different size

work (e.g., Singh & Lee Fleming, 2010; Wu, Wang, & Evans, 2019). Simultaneous discoveries

potentially advance the debate because they make it possible to keep the project—and its intrin-

sic potential—(almost) constant across different settings, allowing the researcher to conduct

what amounts to “twin studies of new ideas.”

Second, what drives new ideas? Historical circumstances—the characteristics of a specific

time and place—play an important role in the emergence of new ideas (e.g., Kneeland, Schil-

ling, & Aharonson, 2019; Sgourev, 2013). Yet it is often difficult to disentangle the impact of

those circumstances from the role of the innovator. Simultaneous discoveries are a useful way

to tackle this challenge. After all, the variables that are important to the emergence of an idea

are likely to become more salient when observed across multiple settings. Moreover, simulta-

neous discoveries often lead to controversies about the allocation of rewards (Merton, 1961),

which can be useful from a research standpoint because they bring to light norms that may oth-

erwise be taken for granted.

One key reason why this research tool has received little scrutiny over the past few decades

is that few datasets of simultaneous discoveries are available. The last published large-scale list

is almost a century old (Ogburn & Thomas, 1922), and has prompted numerous debates about

the degree of similarity necessary to consider that two ideas are the same (Patinkin, 1983;

Schmookler, 1966). Below I describe a new method to build datasets of simultaneous discoveries

in science, based on Cozzens' (1989) observation that teams of scientists who make the same

discovery must share credit for that discovery, and that credit-sharing is visible in the citations

to the discovery articles in the literature. Building on this insight, I propose a systematic and

automated method to collect a dataset of simultaneous discoveries or “paper twins,”which I

make available. I also conduct numerous sensitivity analyses and highlight some of the limita-

tions of this approach.

1

Following the prior literature on this topic (e.g., Merton, 1961; Simonton, 1979) I do not distinguish between different

types of insights—whether scientific discoveries or technological inventions.

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