A Dynamic Network Approach to Breakthrough Innovation

A recent analysis of scientific publication and patent citation networks by Park et al. (Nature, 2023) suggests that publications and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. Here we show that the reported decrease in disruptiveness is an artifact of systematic shifts in the structure of citation networks unrelated to innovation system capacity. Instead, the decline is attributable to 'citation inflation', an unavoidable characteristic of real citation networks that ma...

Technology is a complex system, with technologies relating to each other in a space that can be mapped as a network. The technology network's structure can reveal properties of technologies and of human behavior, if it can be mapped accurately. Technology networks have been made from patent data, using several measures of proximity. These measures, however, are influenced by factors of the patenting system that do not reflect technologies or their proximity. We introduce a me...

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 we study the patterns of change of patents registered by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). We show that the scaling behavior exhibited by this network is consistent with a preferential attachment mechanism together with a Weibull...

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 formal and quantitative characterization of the combinatorial process underpinning inventive activity. Here we utilize U.S. patent records dating from 1790 to 2010 to formally characterize the invention as a combinatorial process. To do th...

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 knowledge spanning on both citation counts and disruptive innovation. The findings show that knowledge spanning has a U-shaped impact on disruptive innovation. In contrast, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between knowledge spann...

Many theories of scientific and technological progress imagine science as an iterative, developmental process periodically interrupted by innovations which disrupt and restructure the status quo. Due to the immense societal value created by these disruptive scientific and technological innovations, accurately operationalizing this perspective into quantifiable terms represents a key challenge for researchers seeking to understand the history and mechanisms underlying scientif...

This paper reports results of a network theory approach to the study of the United States patent system. We model the patent citation network as a discrete time, discrete space stochastic dynamic system. From data on more than 2 million patents and their citations, we extract an attractiveness function, $A(k,l)$, which determines the likelihood that a patent will be cited. $A(k,l)$ is approximately separable into a product of a function $A_k(k)$ and a function $A_l(l)$, where...

Theories of innovation emphasize the role of social networks and teams as facilitators of breakthrough discoveries. Around the world, scientists and inventors today are more plentiful and interconnected than ever before. But while there are more people making discoveries, and more ideas that can be reconfigured in novel ways, research suggests that new ideas are getting harder to find-contradicting recombinant growth theory. In this paper, we shed new light on this apparent p...

One of the most challenging problems in technological forecasting is to identify as early as possible those technologies that have the potential to lead to radical changes in our society. In this paper, we use the US patent citation network (1926-2010) to test our ability to early identify a list of historically significant patents through citation network analysis. We show that in order to effectively uncover these patents shortly after they are issued, we need to go beyond ...

This study examines the network of supply and use of significant innovations across industries in Sweden, 1970-2013. It is found that 30% of innovation patterns can be predicted by network stimulus from backward and forward linkages. The network is hierarchical, characterized by hubs that connect diverse industries in closely knitted communities. To explain the network structure, a preferential weight assignment process is proposed as an adaptation of the classical preferenti...