Measuring technological novelty with patent-based indicators

•We provide a new, more comprehensive measurement of technological novelty covering two dimensions of technological novelty: Novelty in Recombination and Novelty in Knowledge Origins.•Using patent classification and citation information we operationalize and validate these indicators on all patented inventions since 1980.•Inventions identified as technologically novel have a higher dispersion in terms of forward citations received, confirming their higher risk profile.•Inventions identified as technologically novel are more likely to be highly cited, confirming their higher probability to be the antecedent of a radical breakthrough.•Overall, the results support our indicators as ex ante measure of technological novelty with the potential to drive radical technological change. This study provides a new, more comprehensive measurement of technological novelty. Integrating insights from the existing economics and management literature, we characterize inventions ex ante along two dimensions of technological novelty: Novelty in Recombination and Novelty in Knowledge Origins. For the latter dimension we distinguish between Novel Technological and Novel Scientific Origins. For each dimension we propose an operationalization using patent classification and citation information. Results indicate that the proposed measures for the different dimensions of technological novelty are correlated, but each conveys different information. We perform a series of analyses to assess the validity of the proposed measures and compare them with other indicators used in the literature. Moreover, an analysis of the technological impact of inventions identified as novel shows that technological novelty increases the variance of technological impact and the likelihood of being among the positive outliers with respect to impact. This holds particularly for those inventions that combine Novelty in Recombination with Novelty in Technological and Scientific Origins. Overall, the results support our indicator as ex ante measure of technological novelty with the potential to drive radical technological change.