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In the global competition, companies are propelled by an immense pressure to innovate. The trend to produce more new knowledge-intensive products or services and the rapid progress of information technologies arouse huge interest on…
Functional technical performance usually follows an exponential dependence on time but the rate of change (the exponent) varies greatly among technological domains. This paper presents a simple model that provides an explanatory foundation…
We define a novel quantitative strategy inspired by the ecological notion of nestedness to single out the scale at which innovation complexity emerges from the aggregation of specialized building blocks. Our analysis not only suggests that…
Almost by definition, radical innovations create a need to revise existing classification systems. In this paper, we argue that classification system changes and patent reclassification are common and reveal interesting information about…
The human ability to learn rules and solve problems has been a central concern of cognitive science research since the field's earliest days. But we do not just follow rules and solve problems given to us by others: we modify those rules,…
Innovation, typically spurred by reusing, recombining, and synthesizing existing concepts, is expected to result in an exponential growth of the concept space over time. However, our statistical analysis of TechNet, which is a comprehensive…
The rapid rise of AI is poised to disrupt the labor market. However, AI is not a monolith; its impact depends on both the nature of the innovation and the jobs it affects. While computational approaches are emerging, there is no consensus…
Progress in science and technology is punctuated by disruptive innovation and breakthroughs. Researchers have characterized these disruptions to explore the factors that spark such innovations and to assess their long-term trends. However,…
Creative processes are typically divided into three types: combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational. Here, we provide a graphical theory of transformational scientific creativity, synthesizing Boden's insight that transformational…
We survey Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to summarizing, simplifying, and generating patents' text. While solving these tasks has important practical applications - given patents' centrality in the R&D process - patents'…
Human creativity is often described as the mental process of combining associative elements into a new form, but emerging computational creativity algorithms may not operate in this manner. Here we develop an inverse problem formulation to…
The process of innovation follows non-linear patterns across the domains of science, technology, and the economy. Novel bibliometric mapping techniques can be used to investigate and represent distinctive, but complementary perspectives on…
A patent must be deemed novel and non-obvious in order to be granted by the US Patent Office (USPTO). If it is not, a US patent examiner will cite the prior work, or prior art, that invalidates the novelty and issue a non-final rejection.…
While patents and standards have been identified as essential driving components of innovation and market growth, the inclusion of a patent in a standard poses many difficulties. These difficulties arise from the contradicting natures of…
With the ever increasing number of filed patent applications every year, the need for effective and efficient systems for managing such tremendous amounts of data becomes inevitably important. Patent Retrieval (PR) is considered the pillar…
The total number of patents produced by a country (or the number of patents produced per capita) is often used as an indicator for innovation. Here we present evidence that the distribution of patents amongst applicants within many OECD…
Governing artificial intelligence (AI) inventions is a major policy concern, yet definitions and measurement remain contested. We compare four patent-based approaches reflecting distinct understandings of AI. Using US patents (1990-2019),…
We use a simple combinatorial model of technological change to explain the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was a sudden large improvement in technology, which resulted in significant increases in human wealth and life…
The relationship of scientific knowledge development to technological development is widely recognized as one of the most important and complex aspects of technological evolution. This paper adds to our understanding of the relationship…
Recent advances in the quantitative, computational methodology for the modeling and analysis of heterogeneous large-scale data are leading to new opportunities for understanding of human behaviors and faculties, including the manifestation…