Related papers: Innovation beyond intention: harnessing exaptation…
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that…
The web of relations linking technological innovation can be fairly described in terms of patent citations. The resulting patent citation network provides a picture of the large-scale organization of innovations and its time evolution. Here…
Scientists and inventors set the direction of their work amidst an evolving landscape of questions, opportunities, and challenges. This paper introduces a measurement framework to quantify how far researchers move from their existing…
Data-driven artificial intelligence models fed with published scientific findings have been used to create powerful prediction engines for scientific and technological advance, such as the discovery of novel materials with desired…
The theory of interaction-based evolution argues that, at the most basic level of analysis, there is a third alternative for how adaptive evolution works besides a) accidental mutation and natural selection and b) Lamarckism, namely, c)…
Drawing on the theories of knowledge recombination, we aim to unpack the essential tension between tradition and innovation in scientific research. Using the American Physical Society data and computational methods, we analyze the impact of…
Human creativity is the ultimate driving force behind scientific progress. While the building blocks of innovations are often embodied in existing knowledge, it is creativity that blends seemingly disparate ideas. Existing studies have made…
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…
Natural evolution gives the impression of leading to an open-ended process of increasing diversity and complexity. If our goal is to produce such open-endedness artificially, this suggests an approach driven by evolutionary metaphor. On the…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
We stand at the foot of a significant inflection in the trajectory of scientific discovery. As society continues on its fast-paced digital transformation, so does humankind's collective scientific knowledge and discourse. We now read and…
New technologies have the power to revolutionize science. It has happened in the past and is happening again with the emergence of new computational tools, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Despite the documented impact…
This paper studies the impact of artificial intelligence on innovation, exploiting the randomized introduction of a new materials discovery technology to 1,018 scientists in the R&D lab of a large U.S. firm. AI-assisted researchers discover…
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…
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…
Macroevolutionary dynamics often display sudden, explosive surges, where systems remain relatively stable for extended periods before experiencing dramatic acceleration that frequently exceeds traditional exponential growth. This pattern is…
Natural evolution has produced a tremendous diversity of functional organisms. Many believe an essential component of this process was the evolution of evolvability, whereby evolution speeds up its ability to innovate by generating a more…
Understanding the topical evolution in industrial innovation is a challenging problem. With the advancement in the digital repositories in the form of patent documents, it is becoming increasingly more feasible to understand the innovation…
In order to create new products, inventors search and combine previous ideas. Few studies have examined the characteristics of search that lead to new products; most have focused on patent citations, which are often retrospective and may…
One of the defining characteristics of human creativity is the ability to make conceptual leaps, creating something surprising from typical knowledge. In comparison, deep neural networks often struggle to handle cases outside of their…