Related papers: How cumulative is technological knowledge?
Knowledge amount is an integral indicator of the development of society. Humanity produces knowledge in response to challenges from nature and society. Knowledge production depends on population size and human productivity. Productivity is…
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…
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…
Determining how scientific achievements influence the subsequent process of knowledge creation is a fundamental step in order to build a unified ecosystem for studying the dynamics of innovation and competitiveness. Relying separately on…
The relationship of scientific knowledge development to technological development is widely recognized as one of the most important and complex aspects of technological evolution. This paper adds to our understanding of the relationship…
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…
This article examines the proportion of technical knowledge that is eventually patented and discusses implications for innovation. Drawing from economic theory and information science, the study considers a continuum from raw data to…
A fundamental problem in technological studies is how to measure the evolution of technology. The literature has suggested several approaches to measuring the level of technology (or state-of-the-art) and changes in technology. However, the…
An important knowledge dimension of science and technology is the extent to which their development is cumulative, that is, the extent to which later findings build on earlier ones. Cumulative knowledge structures can be studied using a…
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 past few centuries have witnessed a dramatic growth in scientific and technological knowledge. However, the nature of that growth - whether exponential or otherwise - remains controversial, perhaps partly due to the lack of quantitative…
The growth of science and technology is a recombinative process, wherein new discoveries and inventions are built from prior knowledge. Yet relatively little is known about the manner in which scientific and technological knowledge develop…
Although the amount of knowledge that the humans possess has been gradually increasing, we still do not know the procedure and conditions that lead to the creation of new knowledge. An understanding of the modus operandi for the creation of…
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is…
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…
Science progresses by building upon previous discoveries. It is commonly believed that the impact of scientific papers, as measured by citations, is positively correlated with the impact of past discoveries built upon. However, analyzing…
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…
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…
This paper presents a method of understanding the growth of global science as resulting from a mechanism of preferential attachment within networks. The paper seeks to contribute to the development of indicators of knowledge creation and…