"intellectual breakthroughs" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to describe a situation in which someone has achieved a significant intellectual accomplishment. For example: "She had made several important intellectual breakthroughs in her research that vastly increased her scientific reputation."
In which case, are not the paradigm shifts that we celebrate as great intellectual breakthroughs merely the result of outbreaks of mob psychology?
It no longer seems absurd, as its consequences continue to ramify, to say that Marcel Duchamp's invention of the readymade was as startling an intellectual innovation as the contemporary intellectual breakthroughs of Freud and Einstein.
Dr. Itoh said the group's experience eventually paid off because in the memory chip arena progress is measured not in huge intellectual breakthroughs but rather in tenths of microns as circuits are shrunk.
With astounding range and scholarly command, William Everdell constructs a lively and accessible history of nascent Modernism -- narrating portraits of genius, profiling intellectual breakthroughs, and richly evoking the fin-de-siecle atmosphere of Paris, Vienna, St . Louis and St . Petersburg
Innovators count on the patent system to protect their intellectual breakthroughs by giving them exclusive rights to their inventions for a period of time.
William Rosen's The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention considers how scientific and intellectual breakthroughs—specifically, the burgeoning field of mechanical engineering and its resultant affect on patent law ushered in the development of the steam engine, and thus, the Industrial Revolution.
It awaits some massive intellectual breakthrough.
Some commentators, like Mark Leonard, see this as a revolutionary intellectual breakthrough.
The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.
"This report is truly an intellectual breakthrough in terms of accident investigations," she said.
Possibly, it was a nervous breakdown rather than the intellectual breakthrough that Descartes later made it out to be.
