Lee Fleming, a professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (Berkeley IEOR) and the Haas School of Business, has received the 2026 Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize for “Science as a Map in Technological Search,” a study that reshaped how researchers understand the role of science in technological innovation.
Fleming shares the award with co-author Olav Sorenson, now the Joseph Jacobs Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies and a professor of strategy and sociology at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. Their paper was published in the Strategic Management Journal in 2004.
The Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize honors significant work published in the Strategic Management Journal at least five years before the award year, giving the journal’s editorial board time to assess a paper’s sustained influence on research, teaching and practice. Fleming and Sorenson’s recognition more than two decades after publication underscores the enduring impact of a paper that challenged conventional thinking about how science contributes to innovation.
At the heart of the research is a simple but influential idea: Science does more than produce discoveries that later become technologies; it helps inventors search for new innovations more effectively. Fleming and Sorenson described invention as a search for new combinations of existing technologies and argued that scientific knowledge can serve as a “map,” directing inventors toward promising opportunities and away from unproductive paths. The award citation highlights this contribution, noting that the paper “illuminates the mechanisms through which science contributes to the discovery of valuable new technologies.”
The researchers also showed that science becomes especially valuable as technological problems grow more complex. Using patent data, they found that scientific knowledge was most useful when inventors combined highly interdependent technologies, where trial and error is less effective. That insight reframed science not simply as a source of new knowledge, but as a tool for navigating difficult but valuable types of technological search, with implications for how firms pursue innovation and how policymakers evaluate investments in research.
More than 20 years after its publication, “Science as a Map in Technological Search” continues to influence research on science, invention and economic growth. The 2026 Schendel Best Paper Prize recognizes the paper’s lasting contribution: a new way of understanding how scientific knowledge helps inventors navigate complexity and advance technological innovation.