Related papers: Innovation by Displacement
The field of Machine Learning research is divided into subject areas, where each area tries to solve a specific problem, using specific methods. In recent years, borders have almost been erased, and many areas inherit methods from other…
AI research agents can now generate research ideas, design experiments, run code, and draft papers, raising the possibility of large-scale AI-assisted scientific discovery. Many current agent frameworks explicitly encourage the generation…
Marketing scholars have underscored the importance of conceptual articles in providing theoretical foundations and new perspectives to the field. This paper supports the argument by employing two network-based measures -- the number of…
Cultural evolution is driven by how we choose what to consume and share with others. A common belief is that the cultural artifacts that succeed are ones that balance novelty and conventionality. This balance theory suggests that people…
An academic scientist's professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and…
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…
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…
Cities and metropolitan areas are major drivers of creativity and innovation in all possible sectors: scientific, technological, social, artistic, etc. The critical concentration and proximity of diverse mindsets and opportunities,…
Teams are the fundamental units propelling innovation and advancing modern science. A rich literature links the fundamental features of teams, such as their size and diversity, to academic success. However, such analyses fail to capture…
Innovation records often exhibit "hockey-stick" patterns of abrupt, near-singular growth at the collective level. However, this macroscopic explosiveness stands in stark contrast to individual discovery, which remains bounded by cognitive…
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…
We examine the tension between academic impact - the volume of citations received by publications - and scientific disruption. Intuitively, one would expect disruptive scientific work to be rewarded by high volumes of citations and,…
We analyze the publication records of individual scientists, aiming to quantify the topic switching dynamics of scientists and its influence. For each scientist, the relations among her publications are characterized via shared references.…
Dietrich and Haider (2014) justify their integrative framework for creativity founded on evolutionary theory and prediction research on the grounds that "theories and approaches guiding empirical research on creativity have not been…
Most explanations of economic growth are based on knowledge spillovers, where the development of some technologies facilitates the enhancement of others. Empirical studies show that these spillovers can have a heterogeneous and rather…
Science is driven by community endeavors across diverse fields and specializations, forming a complex structure that renders conventional performance evaluation methods inadequate. Using established indicators, the network-based normalized…
The implications of technological innovation for sustainability are becoming increasingly complex with information technology moving machines from being mere tools for production or objects of consumption to playing a role in economic…
We examine the innovation of researchers with long-lived careers in Computer Science and Physics. Despite the epistemological differences between such disciplines, we consistently find that a researcher's most innovative publication occurs…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
Scientific discovery begins with ideas, yet evaluating early-stage research concepts is a subtle and subjective human judgment. As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with generating scientific hypotheses, most systems…