Innovation beyond intention: harnessing exaptation for technological breakthroughs

Science is built on the scholarly consensus that shifts with time. This raises the question of how new and revolutionary ideas are evaluated and become accepted into the canon of science. Using two recently proposed metrics, we identify papers with high atypicality, which models how research draws upon novel combinations of prior research, and evaluate disruption, which captures the degree to which a study creates a new direction by eclipsing its intellectual forebears. Atypi...

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...

The process of innovation follows non-linear patterns across the domains of science, technology, and the economy. Novel bibliometric mapping techniques can be used to investigate and represent distinctive, but complementary perspectives on the innovation process (e.g., "demand" and "supply") as well as the interactions among these perspectives. The perspectives can be represented as "continents" of data related to varying extents over time. For example, the different branches...

Functional technical performance usually follows an exponential dependence on time but the rate of change (the exponent) varies greatly among technological domains. This paper presents a simple model that provides an explanatory foundation for these phenomena based upon the inventive design process. The model assumes that invention - novel and useful design- arises through probabilistic analogical transfers that combine existing knowledge by combining existing individual op...

Cities and metropolitan areas are major drivers of creativity and innovation in all possible sectors: scientific, technological, social, artistic, etc. The critical concentration and proximity of diverse mindsets and opportunities, supported by efficient infrastructures, enable new technologies and ideas to emerge, thrive, and trigger further innovation. Though this pattern seems well established, geography's role in the emergence and diffusion of new technologies still needs...

The aim of this paper is to develop and test metrics to quantitatively identify technological discontinuities in a knowledge network. We developed five metrics based on innovation theories and tested the metrics by a simulation model-based knowledge network and hypothetically designed discontinuity. The designed discontinuity is modeled as a node which combines two different knowledge streams and whose knowledge is dominantly persistent in the knowledge network. The performan...

This work demonstrates the application of a birth-death Markov process, inspired by radioactive decay, to capture the dynamics of innovation processes. Leveraging the Bass diffusion model, we derive a Gompertz-like function explaining the long-term innovation trends. The validity of our model is confirmed using citation data, Google trends, and a recurrent neural network, which also reveals short-term fluctuations. Further analysis through an automaton model suggests these fl...

The notion of the "adjacent possible" has been advanced to theorize the generation of novelty across many different research domains. This study is an attempt to examine in what way the notion can be made empirically useful for innovation studies. A theoretical framework is construed based on the notion of innovation a search process of recombining knowledge to discover the "adjacent possible". The framework makes testable predictions about the rate of innovation, the distrib...

Technologies can help strengthen the resilience of our economy against existential climate-risks. We investigate climate change adaptation technologies (CCATs) in US patents to understand (1) historical patterns and drivers of innovation; (2) scientific and technological requirements to develop and use CCATs; and (3) CCATs' potential technological synergies with mitigation. First, in contrast to mitigation, innovation in CCATs only slowly takes off, indicating a relatively lo...

Using large-scale citation data and a breakthrough metric, the study systematically evaluates the inevitability of scientific breakthroughs. We find that scientific breakthroughs emerge as multiple discoveries rather than singular events. Through analysis of over 40 million journal articles, we identify multiple discoveries as papers that independently displace the same reference using the Disruption Index (D-index), suggesting functional equivalence. Our findings support Mer...