Professor Bruce Weinberg, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at The Ohio State University, studies how scientific breakthroughs happen and the environments that help innovation thrive.

“There are no new ideas, but there are novel ways of combining old ideas to create something new.” This concept lies at the heart of Professor Weinberg’s research. By analyzing the career paths of Nobel Prize winners, he and his colleagues discovered that where researchers work and the people they interact with can have a powerful influence on groundbreaking discoveries.

Professor Weinberg explains how spending time in different research environments and collaborating with new communities can accelerate innovation and play a key role in the development of Nobel Prize–winning ideas.