Why Your World-Changing Idea Could Be Waiting For You — In A Different City

Relocating To New Cities Helped Scientists Launch Prize-Winning Research Sooner

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Packing your bags and moving to a new city might significantly boost your chances of doing extraordinary work. A new international study reveals that scientists who relocated to new cities or maintained positions in multiple locations started their Nobel Prize-winning research nearly 2.6 years earlier than their more stationary counterparts.

The study, published in the International Economic Review, examines how exposure to new places and diverse environments leads to unique combinations of ideas that enhance scientific creativity.

“You’re more likely to come up with that great new idea if you move around, meet new people, have new experiences, encounter new ways of thinking,” says study co-author Bruce Weinberg from Ohio State University, in a statement.

Exposure to fresh perspectives and diverse ideas appears to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. This contradicts the traditional concept that innovation occurs primarily when similar experts cluster together long-term.

The research focused on Nobel laureates in chemistry, medicine, and physics from 1901 to 2003. Using detailed biographical information, they traced where each scientist lived throughout their career and identified exactly when they began the work that would eventually earn them a Nobel Prize.

Scientists who switched to new locations every two years commenced their prize-winning work nearly two years earlier than those who stayed put. Meanwhile, those who consistently held positions in multiple locations, perhaps teaching at one university while researching at another institution, started their most impactful work about 2.6 years sooner.

“You can be in one place with lots of brilliant people, but after a while, you’ve talked to all of them and you develop a common understanding of how things work,” says Weinberg. “You’re less likely to come up with this great breakthrough unless you are exposed to a new set of ideas you haven’t heard before. You can do that by moving or working in several locations.”

This remained true even after controlling for variables like field of study, career stage, and the quality of scientific colleagues. In fact, working among other brilliant minds (measured by the number of eventual Nobel laureates in a scientist’s location) also accelerated breakthroughs, though not as dramatically as geographic mobility did.

For context, the average scientist in the study took about 10.5 years from the start of their career to begin their Nobel-worthy work. So shaving off 2-3 years represents a substantial acceleration of scientific progress.

The research builds on what’s known as “recombinant innovation,” the idea that truly novel discoveries often come from combining previously unrelated concepts or techniques. Moving to new environments apparently exposes scientists to different approaches, perspectives, and problems they might never have encountered otherwise.

“It’s not easy for a scientist to move their lab and work to a new location, but it can substantially boost their research,” adds Weinberg.

The research specifically investigates two key ways scientists encounter novel idea combinations: first, by relocating to places with entirely new intellectual environments, and second, by maintaining connections across multiple locations, allowing them to transfer ideas between different intellectual communities.

Looking at the timeline data, researchers found fascinating patterns across different scientific disciplines. Physicists in the early 20th century typically took about 11.3 years to begin their breakthrough work, but after the quantum revolution, that dropped to around 9.4 years. In medicine, modern laureates (post-1945) started their prize-winning research after just 7.6 years, about 25% faster than their historical predecessors.

The data also revealed dramatic shifts in where scientific innovation happens. Among scientists receiving their highest degrees before 1918, only 10-21% spent their careers in the United States. For those educated after 1945, that proportion jumped to 57-65%, highlighting America’s rising dominance in scientific research throughout the 20th century.

“I think the same might even be true of great painters and artists and anyone in a creative domain – their genius is coming up with novel ideas and expressing them in novel ways. And it helps to move and meet others with different ideas,” says Weinberg.

While the study focused on Nobel Prize winners, an admittedly rarefied group, the researchers believe their findings have broader implications for fostering innovation.

“I think it’s important to remember that Nobel Laureates’ experiences may (or may not!) generalize to the ‘average person,’ if there is such a thing,” Weinberg tells StudyFinds. “We think that doing things that expose people to new ideas or novel mixes of ideas could help people be more creative.”

The authors clarify that they don’t necessarily view Nobel laureates as the most important innovators in their fields, but rather as a significant group of contributors who happen to have the comprehensive historical data needed for this type of analysis.

“We are now using natural language processing to look at how people get new ideas from the people they have worked with. Basically, advances in natural language processing have made it possible to track the flows of ideas across people,” adds Weinberg.

Rather than building permanent clusters of similar experts, institutions might better foster breakthroughs by encouraging scientist mobility and cross-pollination between different research environments. For ambitious scientists or anyone looking to take their ideas to the next level, sometimes a change of scenery is exactly what you need to spark your next big idea.