Related papers: On singularities in combination-driven models of t…
Macroevolutionary dynamics often display sudden, explosive surges, where systems remain relatively stable for extended periods before experiencing dramatic acceleration that frequently exceeds traditional exponential growth. This pattern is…
New ideas are often thought to arise from recombining existing knowledge. Yet despite rapid publication growth - and expanding opportunities for recombination - scientific breakthroughs remain rare. This gap between productivity and…
Despite our familiarity with specific technologies, the origin of new technologies remains mysterious. Are new technologies made from scratch, or are they built up recursively from new combinations of existing technologies? To answer this,…
The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance…
We consider inventions as novel combinations of existing technological capabilities. Patent data allow us to explicitly identify such combinatorial processes in invention activities. Unconsidered in the previous research, not every new…
I explore the concept of growth being rooted in the recombination of existing technology as an explanation for the remarkable growth witnessed during the Industrial Revolution as it was recently proposed by Koppl et al.(2023). I adapt their…
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…
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…
A general theory of innovation and progress in human society is outlined, based on the combat between two opposite forces (conservatism/inertia and speculative herding "bubble" behavior). We contend that human affairs are characterized by…
Recent advances in the development of artificial intelligence, technological progress acceleration, long-term trends of macroeconomic dynamics increase the relevance of technological singularity hypothesis. In this paper, we build a model…
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…
Invention has been commonly conceptualized as a search over a space of combinatorial possibilities. Despite the existence of a rich literature, spanning a variety of disciplines, elaborating on the recombinant nature of invention, we lack a…
Combinatorial evolution - the creation of new things through the combination of existing things - can be a powerful way to evolve rather than design technical objects such as electronic circuits. Intriguingly, this seems to be an ongoing…
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…
Innovation is a key ingredient for the evolution of several systems, including social and biological ones. Focused investigations and lateral thinking may lead to innovation, as well as serendipity and other random discovery processes. Some…
The process of technological change can be regarded as a non-deterministic system governed by factors of a cumulative nature that generate cyclical phenomena. In this context, the process of growth and decline of technology can be…
This article explores the concept of technological singularity and the factors that could accelerate or hinder its arrival. The butterfly effect is used as a framework to understand how seemingly small changes in complex systems can have…
Innovation records often exhibit "hockey-stick" patterns of abrupt, near-singular growth at the collective level. However, this macroscopic explosiveness stands in stark contrast to individual discovery, which remains bounded by cognitive…
Technological developments and the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) are omnipresent themes and concerns of the present day. Much has been written on these topics but applications of quantitative models to understand the techno-social…
Innovation and obsolescence describe dynamics of ever-churning and adapting social and biological systems, concepts that encompass field-specific formulations. We formalize the connection with a reduced model of the dynamics of the "space…