Long-run patterns in the discovery of the adjacent possible

Novelties are part of our daily lives. We constantly adopt new technologies, conceive new ideas, meet new people, experiment with new situations. Occasionally, we as individuals, in a complicated cognitive and sometimes fortuitous process, come up with something that is not only new to us, but to our entire society so that what is a personal novelty can turn into an innovation at a global level. Innovations occur throughout social, biological and technological systems and, th...

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...

This paper outlines a framework for the study of innovation that treats discoveries as additions to evolving networks. As inventions enter they expand or limit the reach of the ideas they build on by influencing how successive discoveries use those ideas. The approach is grounded in novel measures of the extent to which an innovation amplifies or disrupts the status quo. Those measures index the effects inventions have on subsequent uses of prior discoveries. In so doing, the...

Firm clusters are seen as having a positive effect on innovations, what can be interpreted as economies of scale or knowledge spillovers. The processes underlying the success of these clusters remain difficult to isolate. We propose in this paper a stylised agent-based model to test the role of geographical proximity and informal knowledge exchanges between firms on the emergence of innovations. The model is run on synthetic firm clusters. Sensitivity analysis and systematic ...

We introduce a model for the emergence of innovations, in which cognitive processes are described as random walks on the network of links among ideas or concepts, and an innovation corresponds to the first visit of a node. The transition matrix of the random walk depends on the network weights, while in turn the weight of an edge is reinforced by the passage of a walker. The presence of the network naturally accounts for the mechanism of the adjacent possible, and the model r...

This paper introduces a framework to study innovation in a strategic setting, in which innovators allocate their resources between exploration and exploitation in continuous time. Exploration creates public knowledge, while exploitation delivers private benefits. Through the analysis of a class of Markov equilibria, we demonstrate that knowledge spillovers accelerate knowledge creation and expedite its availability, thereby encouraging innovators to increase exploration. The ...

Understanding how humans explore the world in search of novelties is key to foster innovation. Previous studies analyzed novelties in various exploration processes, defining them as the first appearance of an element. However, innovation can also be generated by novel association of what is already known. We hence define higher-order novelties as the first appearances of combinations of two or more elements, and we introduce higher-order Heaps' exponents as a way to character...

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...

In order to create new products, inventors search and combine previous ideas. Few studies have examined the characteristics of search that lead to new products; most have focused on patent citations, which are often retrospective and may not reflect the usefulness of inventions. Through the analysis of collaborations in an online virtual community, the impact of originality on popularity and practicality is tested. These tests in turn are based on a method for measuring the...

Technological cumulativeness is considered one of the main mechanisms for technological progress, yet its exact meaning and dynamics often remain unclear. To develop a better understanding of this mechanism we approach a technology as a body of knowledge consisting of interlinked inventions. Technological cumulativeness can then be understood as the extent to which inventions build on other inventions within that same body of knowledge. The cumulativeness of a technology is t...