Related papers: Innovation by Displacement
Novelty is an inherent part of innovations and discoveries. Such processes may be considered as an appearance of new ideas or as an emergence of atypical connections between the existing ones. The importance of such connections hints for…
Philosophers of science have long postulated how collective scientific knowledge grows. Empirical validation has been challenging due to limitations in collecting and systematizing large historical records. Here, we capitalize on the…
It appears paradoxical that science is producing outstanding new results and theories at a rapid rate at the same time that researchers are identifying serious problems in the practice of science that cause many reports to be irreproducible…
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…
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…
Nobel Prizes are commonly seen to be among the most prestigious achievements of our times. Based on mining several million citations, we quantitatively analyze the processes driving paradigm shifts in science. We find that groundbreaking…
We develop a Schumpeterian quality-ladder spatial model in which innovation arrivals depend on regional knowledge spillovers. A parsimonious reduced-form diffusion mechanism induces the convergence of regions' average distance to the global…
Teams now drive most scientific advances, yet the impact of absolute beginners -- authors with no prior publications -- remains understudied. Analyzing over 29 million articles published between 1941 and 2020 across disciplines and team…
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.…
Consistent confirmations obtained independently of each other lend credibility to a scientific result. We refer to results satisfying this consistency as reproducible and assume that reproducibility is a desirable property of scientific…
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…
How nations shape the scientific frontier matters for technological competition, but standard metrics, including publication counts, citations, and disruption indices, look backward and fail to distinguish between fundamentally different…
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,…
Using three-year moving averages of the complete Journal Citation Reports 1994-2016 of the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index (combined), we analyze links between citing and cited journals in terms of (1) whether…
In research policy, effective measures that lead to improvements in the generation of knowledge must be based on reliable methods of research assessment, but for many countries and institutions this is not the case. Publication and citation…
Novel scientific knowledge is constantly produced by the scientific community. Understanding the level of novelty characterized by scientific literature is key for modeling scientific dynamics and analyzing the growth mechanisms of…
We propose a framework that recasts scientific novelty not as a single attribute of a paper, but as a reflection of its position within the evolving intellectual landscape. We decompose this position into two orthogonal dimensions:…
In this paper, we tackle the problem of innovation spreading from a modeling point of view. We consider a networked system of individuals, with a competition between two groups. We show its relation to the innovation spreading issues. We…
In this work we analyze how reputation-based interactions influence the emergence of innovations. To do so, we make use of a dynamic model that mimics the discovery process by which, at each time step, a pair of individuals meet and merge…
With rising life expectancies around the world and an older scientific workforce than ever before, what does aging mean for individual scientists, and what do aging scientists mean for scientific progress as a whole? Here we examine how…