The Explosion of Scientific Knowledge and Process Innovation : Quantitative analysis of the Blue LED development

Abstract

Despite the attention process innovation draws in the natural sciences, the process innovation literature does not address the way underlying scientific theory makes possible new process innovations that lead to the development of successful new products. This paper focuses on process innovation that is derived from the latest scientific theory. Using bibliometric data on two new compound semi conductive materials, gallium nitride, and zincselenide used in the development of blue light-emitting diodes, our study indicates that there exists the explosion of scientific knowledge behind the success of GaN development research where the explosion is observed by a rapid increase of published papers and one of the factors for the explosion is attributed to technological process innovation shaped by scientific knowledge. Then the properties of process innovation are discussed.