There's a concept in progress studies which I haven't seen discussed, although it's very possibly out there -- if so, apologies + I'd be grateful to know the correct terminology.

Discussions of the importance of an idea or invention use proxies like citation count to measure the impact of the idea -- how influential it has been on later work. (Cf Do Academic Citations Measure the Impact of New Ideas?)

I want to argue that the the value^[1] "to mankind" of a person or group discovering an idea (or making an invention) is not determined solely by the impact of the idea. There's another factor, and that's how much longer it would have taken to find that idea in the counterfactual world where you remove the discoverer/inventor from the picture. An example to show how these might differ:

Oxygen. Scheele discovered oxygen in 1772, Priestly independently in 1774 (and perhaps Lavoisier in 1775). The impact of the discovery of oxygen was huge, but the incremental value to mankind of Scheele discovering it was relatively low; in a world without Scheele, Priestly would have discovered it anyway.

The contribution of a discovery or invention to the overall rate of technological progress is given not by its impact, but by its value. This particularly matters when many people are working in the same area -- a high impact paper by a particular group may actually not have much (incremental) value, because the next group might have been just about to find that idea. Some amount of time that the second group spent will have been duplicative and so wasted.^[2]

By contrast, sometimes an idea seems to come out of nowhere, transforming a field; paradigm shifts are more often like this. The best example I know is not a popular one, unfortunately -- when Richard Montague created Montague grammar, it completely transformed/created the nascent field of formal semantics. The tools that Montague were using were from a completely different field (logic), and without Montague I think it's unlikely that they would have been applied for a long time.

Other high-value examples are the inventions which were not actually made for some time after they were technically possible -- The Knowledge by Dartnell Lewis discusses some. Some such inventions could have been made a century earlier than they actually were; if they had been, that might have resulted in significantly fast...

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