Powerful new methods and tools drive scientific progress—but how do we actually make such innovations? No theory yet explains how we invent major tools across fields. To address this gap, we examine all nobel-prize-winning method discoveries—that enabled breakthrough findings not possible without them—and we trace science’s most influential toolmakers across fields, from Ernst Ruska’s electron microscope and Kary Mullis’s PCR method to Ernest Lawrence’s particle accelerator. Here we lay out the critical pathways taken to create these groundbreaking tools. We introduce a taxonomy of science’s methods and tools: a scientific table of discovery methods that is a map of underexplored and unexplored method opportunities. By mapping the method landscape, we reveal gaps and possibilities that help guide where methods can be adapted, recombined or strategically developed to catalyse discovery. It can help identify and predict untapped combinations of tools—and where the next breakthroughs can come from. What if we no longer wait for new discovery tools to emerge by chance but begin deliberately prioritising their development? How many big breakthroughs are we missing because we have not yet strategically focused on designing the needed tools? We also outline the need for establishing methods labs and hubs—as incubators of innovation—that catalyse tool creation.
Alexander Krauß (Tue,) studied this question.