Not like the others: frontier scientists for high-impact inventions

Linking scientific articles in PubMed and biomedical U.S. patents assigned to firms, we study the role of scientists active at the knowledge frontier, identified as authors on recent top articles. We expect them to be brokers between new scientific findings and inventions in industry with a high technological impact. We find that inventions made by such “frontier authors” are indeed more impactful and more likely to become breakthroughs, not only compared to those made by non-author inventors, but also compared to inventions from non-top authors and non-recent top authors. We also show that inventions with frontier science as prior art are more impactful. Frontier author patents are more likely to use frontier science as prior art in their inventions and to be first users of such frontier science. Yet, while frontier author patents have a significant impact premium on their non-frontier science prior art patents, their frontier science patents are not particularly more successful compared to frontier science patents from other types of inventors. Our results suggest that closeness to frontier science for use in their inventions is only part of the story of superior impact of frontier scientists, which seems a much broader story.