Related papers: Serendipity and strategy in rapid innovation

While working on a software specification, designers usually need to evaluate different architectural alternatives to be sure that quality criteria are met. Even when these quality aspects could be expressed in terms of multiple software…

We propose an approach of open-ended evolution via the simulation of swarm dynamics. In nature, swarms possess remarkable properties, which allow many organisms, from swarming bacteria to ants and flocking birds, to form higher-order…

The ideas that we forge creatively as individuals and groups build on one another in a manner that is cumulative and adaptive, forming open-ended lineages across space and time. Thus, human culture is believed to evolve. The pervasiveness…

This study offers a new perspective on the depth-versus-breadth debate in innovation strategy, by modeling inventive search within dynamic collective knowledge systems, and underscoring the importance of timing for technological impact.…

We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…

Changes, they use to say, are the only constant in life. Everything changes rapidly around us, and more and more key to survival is the ability to rapidly adapt to changes. This consideration applies to many aspects of our lives. Strangely…

Behavior domination is proposed as a tool for understanding and harnessing the power of evolutionary systems to discover and exploit useful stepping stones. Novelty search has shown promise in overcoming deception by collecting diverse…

One of the presuppositions of science since the times of Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has been the predictability of the world. This idea has strongly influenced scientific and technological models. However, in recent decades,…

Whether or not to change strategy depends not only on the personal success of each individual, but also on the success of others. Using this as motivation, we study the evolution of cooperation in games that describe social dilemmas, where…

Criticality has been proposed as a mechanism for the emergence of complexity, life, and computation, as it exhibits a balance between robustness and adaptability. In classic models of complex systems where structure and dynamics are…

This study proposes the concept of disruptive firms: they are firms with market leadership that deliberate introduce new and improved generations of durable goods that destroy, directly or indirectly, similar products present in markets in…

As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…

Culture is not just traits but a dynamic system of interdependent beliefs, practices and artefacts embedded in cognitive, social and material structures. Culture evolves as these entities interact, generating path dependence, attractor…

Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…

The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…

Software development projects management is a complex endeavor because it requires dealing with numerous unforeseen events that constantly arise along the way and that go against the expectations that had been established at the beginning.…

Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health, to sports, business, and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence-believing…

In many work environments, serendipitous interactions between members of different groups may lead to enhanced productivity, collaboration and knowledge dissemination. Two factors that may have an influence on such interactions are cultural…

Robustness is key to engineering, automation, and science as a whole. However, the property of robustness is often underpinned by costly requirements such as over-provisioning, known uncertainty and predictive models, and known adversaries.…

Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…