Idea Inheritance, Originality, and Collective Innovation

Online innovation communities allow for a search for novel solutions within a design space bounded by constraints. Past research has focused on the effect of creative constraints on individual projects, but less is known about how constraints affect learning from repeated design submissions and the effect of the technical constraints that are integral to online platforms. How do creative versus technical constraints affect individual learning in exploring a design space in on...

Where science, design, business and art meet, COINs13 looks at the emerging forces behind the phenomena of open-source, creative, entrepreneurial and social movements. COINs13 combines a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as social network analysis, group dynamics, design and visualization, information systems, collective action and the psychology and sociality of collaboration. The COINs13 conference theme is Learning from the Swarm. The papers in this volume explor...

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...

Online user innovation communities are becoming a promising source of user innovation knowledge and creative users. With the purpose of identifying valuable innovation knowledge and users, this study constructs an integrated super-network model, i.e., User Innovation Knowledge Super-Network (UIKSN), to integrate fragmented knowledge, knowledge fields, users and posts in an online community knowledge system. Based on the UIKSN, the core innovation knowledge, core innovation kn...

The availability of large idea repositories (e.g., the U.S. patent database) could significantly accelerate innovation and discovery by providing people with inspiration from solutions to analogous problems. However, finding useful analogies in these large, messy, real-world repositories remains a persistent challenge for either human or automated methods. Previous approaches include costly hand-created databases that have high relational structure (e.g., predicate calculus r...

Novelty is not a sufficient condition for innovation. For new ideas and products to succeed, they must be integrated into the collective understanding and existing infrastructure, illustrating how the past determines the future. Here, we develop a comprehensive framework to understand how the structure of accumulated past successes curves the adjacent possible trajectory of future innovations. We observe that certain technological building blocks, upon frequent combination, c...

Large repositories of products, patents and scientific papers offer an opportunity for building systems that scour millions of ideas and help users discover inspirations. However, idea descriptions are typically in the form of unstructured text, lacking key structure that is required for supporting creative innovation interactions. Prior work has explored idea representations that were either limited in expressivity, required significant manual effort from users, or dependent...

Considering collaborative patent development, we provide micro-level evidence for innovation through exchanges of differentiated knowledge. Knowledge embodied in a patent is proxied by word pairs appearing in its abstract, while novelty is measured by the frequency with which these word pairs have appeared in past patents. Inventors are assumed to possess the knowledge associated with patents in which they have previously participated. We find that collaboration by inventors ...

A growing community that shares digital 3D designs has created an opportunity to study, encourage and stimulate innovation. This remix community allows people not only to prototype at a minimal cost but also to work on projects they are genuinely interested in. Participants free of the limitations typically imposed by formal organizations develop products driven by their own interest.

In this paper we argue that there is a trade-off between generativity and originality in online communities that support open collaboration. We build on foundational theoretical work in peer production to formulate and test a series of hypotheses suggesting that the generativity of creative works is associated with moderate complexity, prominent authors, and cumulativeness. We also formulate and test three hypotheses that these qualities are associated with decreased original...