Related papers: Serendipity and strategy in rapid innovation
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Like all natural systems, great societies and their cultures emerge by a growth process from their environments, developing, organized, and behaving as wholes with their internal designs linked with their external worlds. So the general…
While material innovation can enable sustainable development, environmental and social impacts of emerging materials are often assessed only after design choices are "locked in." Here, we argue for a shift in perspective: life cycle…
The interaction networks of biological systems are known to take on several non-random structural properties, some of which are believed to positively influence system robustness. Researchers are only starting to understand how these…
We introduce a complex systems perspective on innovation in networks in which innovation is conceptualized as a form of creative act associated with the dynamics and evolution of business network. We show how innovation is a form of…
Serendipity has been associated with numerous benefits in the context of recommender systems, e.g., increased user satisfaction and consumption of long-tail items. Despite this, serendipity in the context of recommender systems has thus far…
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…
Participants in socio-economic systems are often ranked based on their performance. Rankings conveniently reduce the complexity of such systems to ordered lists. Yet, it has been shown in many contexts that those who reach the top are not…
Global change is reshaping ecosystems and societies. Strategic choices that were best yesterday may be sub-optimal tomorrow; and environmental conditions that were once taken for granted may soon cease to exist. In this setting, how people…
We investigate a selection-mutation model for the dynamics of technological innovation,a special case of reaction-diffusion equations. Although mutations are assumed to increase the variety of technologies, not their average success…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
Innovation is fundamental for development and provides a competitive advantage for societies. It is the process of creating more complex technologies, ideas, or protocols from existing ones. While innovation may be created by single agents…
Most research on adaptive decision-making takes a strategy-first approach, proposing a method of solving a problem and then examining whether it can be implemented in the brain and in what environments it succeeds. We present a method for…
Competitive systems can exhibit both hierarchical (transitive) and cyclic (intransitive) structures. Despite theoretical interest in cyclic competition, which offers richer dynamics, and occupies a larger subset of the space of possible…
Studying design creativity and innovation from practical perspectives for companies requires both a good understanding of the company ecosystem and its inner processes contributing to delivered innovations and a rigorous design research…
In order to cope with a complex and changing environment, industries seek to find new and more efficient ways to conduct their business. According to previous research, many of these change efforts fail to achieve their intended aims.…
Scientific innovation increasingly depends on collaboration, yet the organizational structure that fosters breakthrough ideas remains poorly understood. Existing metrics - such as team size or compositional diversity - capture readily…
Social institutions are systems of shared norms and rules that regulate people's behaviors, often emerging without external enforcement. They provide criteria to distinguish cooperation from defection and establish rules to sustain…
Cultural evolution allows ideas and technologies to accumulate across generations, reaching their most complex and open-ended form in humans. While social learning enables the transmission of such innovations, the cognitive processes that…
Schumpeter's (1939) distinction between changes in the form of the production function corresponding to innovation, and shifts along the production function corresponding to factor substitution, does not preclude that the underlying…