  An ongoing interest in innovation studies is to understand how knowledge
generated from scientific research can be used in the development of
technologies. While previous inquiries have devoted to studying the scientific
capacity of technologies and institutional factors facilitating technology
transfer, little is known about the intrinsic characteristics of scientific
publications that gain direct technological impact. Here we focus on two
features, namely basicness and novelty. Using a corpus of 3.8 million papers
published between 1980 and 1999, we find that basic science papers and novel
papers are substantially more likely to achieve direct technological impact.
Further analysis that limits to papers with technological impact reveals that
basic science and novel science have more patent citations, experience shorter
time lag, and have impact in broader technological fields.
