Idea Inheritance, Originality, and Collective Innovation

Innovation, typically spurred by reusing, recombining, and synthesizing existing concepts, is expected to result in an exponential growth of the concept space over time. However, our statistical analysis of TechNet, which is a comprehensive technology semantic network encompassing over four million concepts derived from patent texts, reveals a linear rather than exponential expansion of the overall technological concept space. Moreover, there is a notable decline in the origi...

Innovation inside companies is difficult to see. But an emerging online community of inventors who publicly post 3D CAD drawings of their work provide a way to observe - and perhaps amplify - innovation. In this paper we analyze the network structure of Thingiverse, a website oriented toward 3D printing. This form of printing blurs the line between creating information and manufacturing objects: drawings can be sent to devices that build 3D objects out of many materials, incl...

Data-driven conceptual design methods and tools aim to inspire human ideation for new design concepts by providing external inspirational stimuli. In prior studies, the stimuli have been limited in terms of coverage, granularity, and retrieval guidance. Here, we present a knowledge based expert system that provides design stimuli across the semantic, document and field levels simultaneously from all fields of engineering and technology and that follows creativity theories to ...

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...

Collective idea generation and innovation processes are complex and dynamic, involving a large amount of qualitative narrative information that is difficult to monitor, analyze, and visualize using traditional methods. In this study, we developed three new visualization methods for collective idea generation and innovation processes and applied them to data from online social network experiments. The first visualization is the Idea Cloud, which helps monitor collective idea p...

Collective design and innovation are crucial in organizations. To investigate how the collective design and innovation processes would be affected by the diversity of knowledge and background of collective individual members, we conducted three collaborative design task experiments which involved nearly 300 participants who worked together anonymously in a social network structure using a custom-made computer-mediated collaboration platform. We compared the idea generation ac...

In today's world, where moving forward hinges on innovation and working together, this article introduces a new global online platform that is all about sparking teamwork to come up with new ideas. This platform goes beyond borders and barriers between different fields, creating an exciting space where people from all over the world can swap ideas, get helpful feedback, and team up on exciting projects. What sets our platform apart is its ability to tap into the combined brai...

The article considers the quantitative assessment approach to the innovativeness of different objects. The proposed assessment model is based on the object data retrieval from various databases including the Internet. We present an object linguistic model, the processing technique for the measurement results including the results retrieved from the different search engines, and the evaluating technique of the source credibility. Empirical research of the computational model a...

Novelty is a key ingredient of innovation but quantifying it is difficult. This is especially true for visual work like graphic design. Using designs shared on an online social network of professional digital designers, we measure visual novelty using statistical learning methods to compare an images features with those of images that have been created before. We then relate social network position to the novelty of the designers images. We find that on this professional plat...

The principles of open collaboration for innovation (and production), once distinctive to open source software, are now found in many other ventures. Some of these ventures are internet-based: Wikipedia, online forums and communities. Others are off-line: in medicine, science, and everyday life. Such ventures have been affecting traditional firms, and may represent a new organizational form. Despite the impact of such ventures, questions remain about their operating principle...