What NASA’s space shuttle can teach us about breakthrough inventions

By Vicki Christian
Fisher College of Business

Long before Artemis II’s 10-day lunar flyby, NASA sent astronauts into space on rocket-style ships like Apollo 11. But in the space age of the late 1960s, scientists wanted to create something completely new and reusable: a plane-shaped shuttle.

The design and creation of the iconic shuttle has long provided STEM scholars with plenty of case studies and research opportunities, but Fisher’s Minyoung Kim was intrigued by a different question: “How did the scientists conceive of the breakthrough invention?”

“There are many studies about inventions and innovations but not many about breakthrough inventions because, by definition, they are a rare occurrence,” said Kim, a distinguished professor of management at Fisher. “For most inventions, people take an existing product and improve certain aspects of it to make it better. But a breakthrough invention is totally new.”

Kim and fellow researcher Raja Roy, associate professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Martin Tuchman School of Management, reviewed numerous archival data and published and unpublished documents by NASA’s scientists, engineers and historians to conduct an in-depth, historically grounded case study. Ultimately they, and other colleagues, found that the space agency’s breakthrough invention, the plane-shaped shuttle, depended on the interaction of two core mechanisms: oscillation and accumulation.

Oscillation means deliberately going back and forth like a pendulum, hitting a performance goal/level in one round of design, then pulling away from it in the next to try something different. Accumulation refers to gradually building knowledge over time, even if progress isn’t steady, by increasing or decreasing how many performance goals/levels are met with each new version.

By repeatedly testing, adjusting and learning in this way, NASA was ultimately able to design the space shuttle.

During oscillation, NASA scientists focused on one of six-product attributes at a time: an orbiter with a 15-foot by 60-foot payload bay; a 50,000-pound payload for the shuttle; an external tank attached to the orbiter that would carry liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen; and a disposable and reusable booster with a solid-rocket motor.

“These six different attributes of the shuttle were all interacting, they were influencing each other,” Kim said. “For example, when you need a larger payload capacity, it influences how much power you need and how much weight you can carry. As they made calculations they had to do subsets of things one at a time and see how the others worked.”

Instead of starting with attribute one and then adding attributes two and three, NASA started with the one they had prior experience using, attribute three, the liquid hydrogen tank, before adding other attributes. When they met a goal, they intentionally moved away to explore other aspects of different elements.

“They repeated this multiple times and then on the last swing, they actually achieved all six attributes,” Kim said. “Throughout multiple oscillation procedures, they accumulated knowledge, learned the processes and eventually ended up with a breakthrough product that achieved all six attributes. Oscillation may have looked like a failure or error, but it was their strategic intent to learn about and deal with the complex interactions and, by doing so, achieve the entire goal.”

Their paper, "Creating a breakthrough invention: NASA’s internal knowledge generation for the Space Shuttle,” was recently published in Research Policy. Co-authors of the paper included Curba Morris Lampert, of the College of Business at Florida International University, and Professor Francisco Polidoro Jr. of the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas.

The authors used inductive analysis of NASA’s data, moving from specific observations to broader generalizations, to find that oscillation and accumulation drove NASA’s breakthrough invention.

“Our first initial observation of oscillation was kind of counter-intuitive,” Kim said. “The fundamental challenge in NASA’s breakthrough invention was creating new designs with different features from the previous ones. Through those designs they eventually came up with a design that had all the attributes they were working towards. No one had ever done that before.”

While the space shuttle creation took place more than 50 years ago, Kim said the research on its invention is still relevant today.

“Oscillation and accumulation are generalizable concepts that you can apply to other industries,” Kim said, citing other breakthroughs such as Neuralink, Supersonic commercial air travel and Hyperloop. “For practitioners, engineers and scientists who really want to create a breakthrough innovation, this research may give them some framework on what to expect and how they can better develop their creation by going through this process. It can assure them they are making progress and provide some theoretical guidance and evidence.”