Serendipity and strategy in rapid innovation

Serendipity plays an important role in scientific discovery. Indeed, many of the most important breakthroughs, ranging from penicillin to the electric battery, have been made by scientists who were stimulated by a chance exposure to unsought but useful information. However, not all scientists are equally likely to benefit from such serendipitous exposure. Although scholars generally agree that scientists with a prepared mind are most likely to benefit from serendipitous encou...

Innovation is a key ingredient for the evolution of several systems, including social and biological ones. Focused investigations and lateral thinking may lead to innovation, as well as serendipity and other random discovery processes. Some individuals are talented at proposing innovation (say innovators), while others at deeply exploring proposed novelties, at getting further insights on a theory, or at developing products, services, and so on (say developers). This separati...

While evolutionary computation is well suited for automatic discovery in engineering, it can also be used to gain insight into how humans and organizations could perform more effectively. Using a real-world problem of innovation search in organizations as the motivating example, this article first formalizes human creative problem solving as competitive multi-agent search (CMAS). CMAS is different from existing single-agent and team search problems in that the agents interact...

Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them unnavigable. This complexity results from innovation's importance for society, but also the fundamental paradox underlying innovation science: When innovation becomes predictable, it ceases to be an engine of novelty and change. Here we review inn...

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 and obsolescence describe dynamics of ever-churning and adapting social and biological systems, concepts that encompass field-specific formulations. We formalize the connection with a reduced model of the dynamics of the "space of the possible" (e.g. technologies, mutations, theories) to which agents (e.g. firms, organisms, scientists) couple as they grow, die, and replicate. We predict three regimes: the space is finite, ever growing, or a Schumpeterian dystopia i...

In this work, we introduce an extremely general model for a collection of innovation processes in order to model and analyze the interaction among them. We provide theoretical results, analytically proven, and we show how the proposed model fits the behaviors observed in some real data sets (from Reddit and Gutenberg). It is worth mentioning that the given applications are only examples of the potentialities of the proposed model and related results: due to its abstractness a...

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 the innovation space can be interpreted as a natural system in which advantageous capabilities are selected by evolutionary pressure, but also that the emerging structure of capabilities is not independent of the scale of observation at whi...

The term serendipity describes a creative process that develops, in context, with the active participation of a creative agent, but not entirely within that agent's control. While a system cannot be made to perform serendipitously on demand, we argue that its $\mathit{serendipity\ potential}$ can be increased by means of a suitable system architecture and other design choices. We distil a unified description of serendipitous occurrences from historical theorisations of serend...

Innovation is fundamental for development and provides a competitive advantage for societies. It is the process of creating more complex technologies, ideas, or protocols from existing ones. While innovation may be created by single agents (i.e. individuals or organisations), it is often a result of social interactions between agents exchanging and combining complementary expertise and perspectives. The structure of social networks impacts this knowledge exchange process. To ...