A study by a researcher and two alumni from the Naveen Jindal School of Management examines how digitization has reshaped startup innovation over the past decade.
Dr. H. Dennis Park, an associate professor in the Jindal School’s Organization, Strategy, and International Management Area, explores how a shift toward the digitization of inventive knowledge influences how startups identify, access, and integrate technological knowledge.
The paper, “Startup Innovation in the Digital Era,” was co-authored by Park; Dr. Jung H. Kwon, PhD’22, of the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver; and Shu Deng, PhD’24, of the School of Business Administration at the University of Mississippi. It will be published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal’s December 2025 special issue — “Entrepreneurial Decisions in the Digital Age”.
The team’s research focuses on Google’s 2006 digitization of U.S. patent records and scientific articles, and how the shift has reshaped the innovation trajectories of entrepreneurial ventures.
“Using the sudden launch of the 2006 Google Patents online platform as a research design, we find that digitization fosters distant and interdisciplinary knowledge searches, enabling startups to synthesize scientific knowledge and novel technological insights through enhanced search efficiency and effectiveness,” Park said.
The study’s findings reveal that digitization also enhances innovation outputs.
“It enables startups to traverse unfamiliar technological domains, generate more applicable recombination and produce patented inventions of greater technological quality and more cross-disciplinary,” Kwon said. “This suggests that digital access to codified knowledge is not just a facilitating input but a capability-enhancing tool that redefines how entrepreneurs solve complex problems.”
Each 100-mile increase in geographic distance from the nearest physical archive corresponds to notable improvements in invention outputs: a 20% increase in the number of patent applications, a 69% improvement in the quality of the applications, an 11% expansion into new technological domains and a 17% augmentation in the applicability of granted patents.
“These findings underscore the role of digitization in catalyzing invention activities and breeding cross-pollinated innovation with broader entrepreneurial and technological utility,” Deng said. “Our findings challenge conventional assumptions about knowledge spillovers and geographic agglomeration, suggesting that digital archives, when paired with adequate online platforms with digital functionalities, unshackle startups from resource- and location-based constraints, enabling them to reconfigure their innovation strategies.”
Park compared the impact of digitization on modern innovation to that of Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century. Just as the printing press expanded access to information and sped up the spread of knowledge, he said, digitization has triggered a new era of innovation by lowering search costs and making technical knowledge more widely available in the 21st century.
“Indeed, over the last two decades, digital traffic has supplanted physical foot traffic in determining preferred geographies for innovation ecosystems,” Park said. “The implications of our findings extend across several domains within strategic entrepreneurship and innovation scholarship.”
The findings highlight four key areas: how online platforms, data availability, and algorithms guide entrepreneurial discovery; how digital platforms affect different kinds of strategic searches; how access to digital tools and their search functionalities impact inequality and inclusive opportunity; and how early adoption of digital systems may lead to long-term innovation advantages.
Park said the research demonstrates that digitization can act as a transformative force in entrepreneurial ecosystems, not simply by enhancing search efficiency but by reconfiguring how firms effectively access, interpret, and recombine technological knowledge for their innovation.
“These findings speak to a broader shift in the infrastructure of innovation and suggest that the future of technology-based entrepreneurship will be deeply intertwined with the architectures of digital knowledge,” he said. “We hope this work contributes to scholarly discourse, informs institutional design, and supports practitioners seeking to harness the full potential of digital innovation environments.”
