Related papers: Serendipity and strategy in rapid innovation
The term serendipity describes a creative process that develops, in context, with the active participation of a creative agent, but not entirely within that agent's control. While a system cannot be made to perform serendipitously on…
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…
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 and evolution are two processes of paramount relevance for social and biological systems. In general, the former allows to introduce elements of novelty, while the latter is responsible for the motion of a system in its phase…
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…
The evolution of economic and innovation systems at the national scale is shaped by a complex dynamics, the footprint of which is the nested structure of the activities in which different countries are competitive. Nestedness is a…
Computing systems are omnipresent; their sustainability has become crucial for our society. A key aspect of this sustainability is the ability of computing systems to cope with the continuous change they face, ranging from dynamic operating…
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…
Context. Innovation is promoted in companies to help them stay competitive. Four types of innovation are defined: product, process, business, and organizational. Objective. We want to understand the perception of the innovation concept in…
Serendipity plays an important role in scientific discovery. Indeed, many of the most important breakthroughs, ranging from penicillin to the electric battery, have been made by scientists who were stimulated by a chance exposure to…
For organizations to survive and flourish in the long term, innovation and novelty must be continually introduced, which is particularly true in today's rapidly changing world. This raises a variety of ethical and sustainability…
A key challenge when trying to understand innovation is that it is a dynamic, ongoing process, which can be highly contingent on ephemeral factors such as culture, economics, or luck. This means that any analysis of the real-world process…
Breakthrough discoveries and inventions involve unexpected combinations of contents including problems, methods, and natural entities, and also diverse contexts such as journals, subfields, and conferences. Drawing on data from tens of…
We envision future technologies through science fiction, strategic planning, or academic research. Yet, our expectations do not always match with what actually unfolds, much like navigating a story where some events align with expectations…
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,…
We study a simple model for the evolution of the cost (or more generally the performance) of a technology or production process. The technology can be decomposed into $n$ components, each of which interacts with a cluster of $d-1$ other,…
It has been suggested that innovations occur mainly by combination: the more inventions accumulate, the higher the probability that new inventions are obtained from previous designs. Additionally, it has been conjectured that the…
Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them…
Innovation and obsolescence describe the dynamics of ever-churning social and biological systems, from the development of economic markets to scientific and technological progress to biological evolution. They have been widely discussed,…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…