Related papers: Idea engines: Unifying innovation and obsolescence…
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,…
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;…
Novelties are part of our daily lives. We constantly adopt new technologies, conceive new ideas, meet new people, experiment with new situations. Occasionally, we as individuals, in a complicated cognitive and sometimes fortuitous process,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Can sustained open-ended technological progress preserve natural resources in a finite planet? We address this question on the basis of a stylized model with genuine open-ended technological innovation, where an innovation event corresponds…
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…
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…
Despite the vast literature on the diffusion of innovations that impacts a broad range of disciplines, our understanding of the abandonment of innovations remains limited yet is essential for a deeper understanding of the innovation…
Open-ended evolution (OEE) is relevant to a variety of biological, artificial and technological systems, but has been challenging to reproduce in silico. Most theoretical efforts focus on key aspects of open-ended evolution as it appears in…
A general theory of innovation and progress in human society is outlined, based on the combat between two opposite forces (conservatism/inertia and speculative herding "bubble" behavior). We contend that human affairs are characterized by…
The diffusion of ideas is often closely connected to the creation and diffusion of knowledge and to the technological evolution of society. Because of this, knowledge creation, exchange and its subsequent transformation into innovations for…
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…
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…
Models on innovation, for the most part, do not include a comprehensive and end-to-end view. Most innovation policy attention seems to be focused on the capacity to innovate and on input factors such as R&D investment, scientific…
We study a spatially homogeneous model of a market where several agents or companies compete for a wealth resource. In analogy with ecological systems the simplest case of such models shows a kind of "competitive exclusion" principle.…
Modern ecology has re-emphasized the need for a quantitative understanding of the original 'survival of the fittest theme' based on analyzis of the intricate trade-offs between competing evolutionary strategies that characterize the…
The dynamics of urban systems can be understood from an evolutionary perspective, in some sense extending biological and cultural evolution. Models for systems of cities implementing elementary evolutionary processes remain however to be…