Knowledge Recombination, Diffusion, and Research Team Composition: Understanding 21st Century Innovatio

This dissertation explores the relationship between information structure, team composition, and research impact. In the initial chapter it presents the antecedent knowledge, recombination, subsequent knowledge use (ARS) model that provides a framework for simultaneously assessing the relationship between antecedent knowledge use and team and researcher effects on future research impact.;The second chapter proposes and demonstrates four measures of semantic citation distance. These measures of knowledge translation, knowledge integration, knowledge diffusion, and knowledge scope enable more nuanced citation analysis, and provide insight into both the way research recombines preexisting information and the way knowledge diffuses.;The third chapter explores the relationships between knowledge recombination, team composition, and impact. It demonstrates that diverse knowledge inputs on their own do not necessarily lead to a greater probability of having a high impact, and that diverse teams are not inclined to make more diverse citations. However, when both team and information factors are simultaneously accounted for, we see that T-shaped teams with both broad and deep experience enjoy an advantage when they apply T-shaped knowledge that is also broad and deep.;The final substantive chapter explores the policy implications of the changes to the innovation system that are demonstrated in Chapters 2--3. It shows that the Patent Office has evolved to assess 20th century innovation, and that reforms are needed to enable efficient assessment of 21st century inventions. The tendency towards more complex inventions that draw on disparate areas of prior art and the growth in the amount of information that patent examiners must search through in order to identify potentially disqualifying prior art require changes to the patent assessment process that will assist examiners in ensuring that only truly novel and nonobvious inventions are granted patent protection.