A Dynamic Network Approach to Breakthrough Innovation

This paper advances a framework for modeling the component interactions between cognitive and social aspects of scientific creativity and technological innovation. Specifically, it aims to characterize Innovation Networks; those networks that involve the interplay of people, ideas and organizations to create new, technologically feasible, commercially-realizable products, processes and organizational structures. The tri-partite framework captures networks of ideas (Concept Le...

Where do firms innovate? Mapping their locations and directions in technological space is challenging due to its high dimensionality. We propose a new method to characterize firms' inventive activities via topological data analysis (TDA) that represents high-dimensional data in a shape graph. Applying this method to 333 major firms' patents in 1976--2005 reveals substantial heterogeneity: some firms remain undifferentiated; others develop unique portfolios. Firms with unique ...

Teams dominate the production of high-impact science and technology. Analyzing teamwork from more than 50 million papers, patents, and software products, 1954-2014, we demonstrate across this period that larger teams developed recent, popular ideas, while small teams disrupted the system by drawing on older and less prevalent ideas. Attention to work from large teams came immediately, while advances by small teams succeeded further into the future. Differences between small a...

Urban outputs, from economy to innovation, are known to grow as a power of a city's population. But, since large cities tend to be central in transportation and communication networks, the effects attributed to city size may be confounded with those of intercity connectivity. Here, we map intercity networks for the world's two largest economies (the United States and China) to explore whether a city's position in the networks of communication, human mobility, and scientific c...

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, we introduce a simple model of recursive innovation in which technologies are made up of components and combinations of components can be turned into new components---a process we call technological recursion. We derive a formula for the ex...

A knowledge search is a key process for inventions. However, there is inadequate quantitative modeling of dynamic knowledge search processes and associated search costs. In this study, agent-based and complex network methodologies were proposed to quantitatively describe the dynamic process of knowledge search for actual inventions. Prior knowledge networks (PKNs), the search space of historical patents, were constructed, representative search rules were formulated for R&D ag...

This paper studies the impact of Demand-pull (DP) and Technology-push (TP) on growth, innovation, and the factor bias of technological change in a two-layer network of input-output (market) and patent citation (innovation) links among 307 6-digit US manufacturing industries in 1977-2012. Two types of TP and DP are distinguished: (1) DP and TP are between-layer spillovers when market demand shocks pull innovation and innovation pushes market growth. (2) Within-layer DP arises ...

Recent works in the information science literature have presented cases of using patent databases and patent classification information to construct network maps of technology fields, which aim to aid in competitive intelligence analysis and innovation decision making. Constructing such a patent network requires a proper measure of the distance between different classes of patents in the patent classification systems. Despite the existence of various distance measures in the ...

Firms' innovation potential depends on their position in the R&D network. But details on this relation remain unclear because measures to quantify network embeddedness have been controversially discussed. We propose and validate a new measure, coreness, obtained from the weighted k-core decomposition of the R&D network. Using data on R&D alliances, we analyse the change of coreness for 14,000 firms over 25 years and patenting activity. A regression analysis demonstrates that ...

Scientific and technological progress is largely driven by firms in many domains, including artificial intelligence and vaccine development. However, we do not know yet whether the success of firms' research activities exhibits dynamic regularities and some degree of predictability. By inspecting the research lifecycles of 7,440 firms, we find that the economic value of a firm's early patents is an accurate predictor of various dimensions of a firm's future research success. ...