Suspense and surprise in the book of technology: Understanding innovation dynamics

TL;DR

This paper explores the inherent uncertainty in technological innovation by analyzing suspense and surprise in patent data, revealing how these categories influence technology adoption and lifecycle stages.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework distinguishing suspense and surprise in innovation, linking these to technology evolution and societal integration.

Findings

Suspenseful innovations integrate more smoothly and achieve higher citations.

Surprising innovations are often disruptive but face adoption challenges.

Categories of suspense and surprise help identify technology lifecycle stages.

Abstract

We envision future technologies through science fiction, strategic planning, or academic research. Yet, our expectations do not always match with what actually unfolds, much like navigating a story where some events align with expectations while others surprise us. This gap indicates the inherent uncertainty of innovation-how technologies emerge and evolve in unpredictable ways. Here, we elaborate on this inherent uncertainty of innovation in the way technologies emerge and evolve. We define suspense captures accumulated uncertainty and describing events anticipated before their realization, while surprise represents a dramatic shift in understanding when an event occurs unexpectedly. We identify those connections in U.S. patents and show that suspenseful innovations tend to integrate more smoothly into society, achieving higher citations and market value. In contrast, surprising innovations, though often disruptive and groundbreaking, face challenges in adoption due to their extreme novelty. We further show that these categories allow us to identify distinct stages of technology life cycles, suggesting a way to identify the systematic trajectory of technologies and anticipate their future paths.