Related papers: The gold-rush effect: how innovation speeds up
Innovation is the driving force of human progress. Recent urn models reproduce well the dynamics through which the discovery of a novelty may trigger further ones, in an expanding space of opportunities, but neglect the effects of social…
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…
Empirical studies of scientific discovery---so-called Eurekometrics---have indicated that the output of exploration proceeds as a logistic growth curve. Although logistic functions are prevalent in explaining population growth that is…
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…
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…
A feature of human creativity is the ability to take a subset of existing items (e.g. objects, ideas, or techniques) and combine them in various ways to give rise to new items, which, in turn, fuel further growth. Occasionally, some of…
This paper is based on the premise that economic growth is driven by an interplay between innovation and imitation in an economy composed of interacting firms operating in a stochastic environment. A novel approach to modeling imitation is…
This paper introduces a framework to study innovation in a strategic setting, in which innovators allocate their resources between exploration and exploitation in continuous time. Exploration creates public knowledge, while exploitation…
The notion of the "adjacent possible" has been advanced to theorize the generation of novelty across many different research domains. This study is an attempt to examine in what way the notion can be made empirically useful for innovation…
We address a novel approach for stochastic individual-based modelling of a single species population. Individuals are distinguished by their remaining lifetimes, which are regulated by the interplay between the inexorable running of time…
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…
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…
The empirical and theoretical justification of Gartner hype curves is a very relevant open question in the field of Technological Life Cycle analysis. The scope of the present paper is to introduce a simple model describing the growth of…
Observational entropy -- a quantity that unifies Boltzmann's entropy, Gibbs' entropy, von Neumann's macroscopic entropy, and the diagonal entropy -- has recently been argued to play a key role in a modern formulation of statistical…
Understanding how simple local interactions give rise to emergent exploration patterns is a fundamental question in statistical physics. We introduce a minimal model of two coupled agents that avoid retracing their own paths while being…
We introduce a novel stochastic growth process, the record-driven growth process, which originates from the analysis of a class of growing networks in a universal limiting regime. Nodes are added one by one to a network, each node…
We study a networked system of innovation processes, where each process is modeled as an urn with infinitely many colors-a classical framework for capturing the emergence of novelties. Extending this paradigm, we analyze a model of…
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…
In our modern society, people are daily confronted with an increasing amount of information of any kind. As a consequence, the attention capacities and processing abilities of individuals often saturate. People, therefore, have to select…
The dynamics of a population expanding into unoccupied habitat has been primarily studied for situations in which growth and dispersal parameters are uniform in space or vary in one dimension. Here we study the influence of finite-sized…