Most innovation builds closely on existing knowledge and technology, delivering incremental advances on existing ideas, products, and processes. Sometimes, however, inventors make discoveries that seem very distant from what is known and well understood. How do individuals and firms explore such...

We integrate research on creativity and innovation at the individual, group and interfirm-network levels to develop a level-agnostic definition of a knowledge network. We identify properties of these networks that appear to be common across levels, and show how these properties influence...