Related papers: The mathematical structure of innovation
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…
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…
Technological knowledge evolves not only through the generation of new ideas, but also through the reinterpretation of existing ones. Reinterpretations lead to changes in the classification of knowledge, that is, reclassification. This…
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;…
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…
Technological cumulativeness is considered one of the main mechanisms for technological progress, yet its exact meaning and dynamics often remain unclear. To develop a better understanding of this mechanism we approach a technology as a…
Technology adoption research aims to determine the reasons why and how individuals, corporations, and industries start using new technology. Furthermore, technology adoption itself is decomposed into underlying sub-processes which are…
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…
We propose a simple model where the innovation rate of a technological domain depends on the innovation rate of the technological domains it relies on. Using data on US patents from 1836 to 2017, we make out-of-sample predictions and find…
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,…
We show that the space in which scientific, technological and economic developments interplay with each other can be mathematically shaped using pioneering multilayer network and complexity techniques. We build the tri-layered network of…
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 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…
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…
Innovation and its complement exnovation describe the progression of realized possibilities from the past to the future, and the process depends on the structure of the underlying graph. For example, the phylogenetic tree represents the…
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 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…
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…
The emergence of large language models offers new possibilities for structured exploration of scientific knowledge. Rather than viewing scientific discovery as isolated ideas or content, we propose a structured approach that emphasizes the…
A fundamental question in system design is to decide how much of the design of one component must be known in order to successfully design another component of the system. We study this question in the setting of reactive synthesis, where…