The Winning Age Dynamic and Great Achievement: Evidence From Nobel Laureates

With increasing attention to the connection between individual performance and knowledge management, many researchers view the Nobel Prize as the best indicator of peak performance and its determinants. Drawing on the knowledge-based and resource-based views, the study used 440 Nobel laureates’ observations in physics, chemistry, and medicine and 1.5 billion cited reference connections from journals in the Institute for Scientific Information database to reveal the proposed prediction. The results show the inverse U-shaped relationship between Nobel Prize-winning age and speed of great achievement. This study also demonstrated moderately negative roles of dependence of external knowledge and positively moderate roles of age at completion of highest degree between Nobel Prize-winning age and speed of great achievement. The nonlinear relationship to the moderating mechanism is discussed.