This article develops a framework for driving innovation under highly ambiguous conditions. An analysis of the most novel medicines of the past 20 years shows that a very large group of small companies created more breakthroughs, at considerably less overall cost, than a much smaller group of very large companies. This article’s findings present the first large-scale empirical validation of the theoretical literature predicting the superiority of decentralized parallel searches in ambiguous environments. Accordingly, companies that attempt to “de-risk” the innovation portfolio by narrowing their search efforts to minimize failures run the risk of filtering out the next breakthrough.

本文开发了一个在高度模糊的条件下驱动创新的框架。对过去20年中最新颖的药物进行的分析表明，与一小批非常大型的公司相比，一大批小规模的公司以更少的总体成本创造了更多的突破。本文的发现提出了理论文献的首次大规模实证验证，该理论文献预测了模棱两可的环境中分散并行搜索的优越性。因此，试图通过缩小搜索范围以最大程度地减少故障来“降低”创新产品组合的风险的公司冒着滤除下一个突破的风险。