The fate of novel ideas: Scholar investigates factors that thwart potential innovations from gaining acceptance

Innovation may be what drives progress in the arts, business, sciences and technology, but the novel ideas that drive innovation often face headwinds that hinder or even prevent their adoption.

Why did some good ideas, such as hand sanitizing in 19th-century hospitals or racial integration in the 20th century, take years to win widespread embrace? University of Utah postdoctoral researcher Wayne Johnson set out to identify the hurdles.

His research team’s program of five studies, which featured analyses of evaluations of films screened at Utah’s Sundance Film Festival and of products pitched on the television program Shark Tank, found that people are more likely to disagree about how valuable something is the less familiar it is. That is, the more unconventional a film or company, the wider the range of opinions it will garner.