1/ Lit surveys and discovery exercises serve 2 purposes, not 1: providing idea fuel and containing downside of potential blindside errors
Conversation
Replying to
2/ Conflating the two purposes leads to misery and terrible work because very different subsets of discovery findings drive them.
1
1
Replying to
3/ For idea fuel, you want to throw to choose from the ends of the distribution: most-cited and least-cited.
1
3
Replying to
4/ The most cited work gives you foundations to build on. Obscure works give you novel starting points that have chance for high ROI
4
4
Replying to
Often it's not low-cited work that gives good starting points, but work that's highly-cited in some other (disconnected) community.
1
2
2
Replying to
Yes, I'd say the cross-pollination sub-category is possibly even the majority.

