A mathematical model of innovation
The article describes a new mathematical model of innovation patterns. The model accounts for unexpected breakthroughs as well as anticipated developments, a feature not seen in previous ones.
This model ties in with the Objectivist view of conceptualizing, which Ayn Rand describes as “an actively sustained process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one’s perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sum.” –Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Ethics.
According to the authors, their model applies both to novelties - “they are new to an individual” – and to innovations - “they are new to the world.” Conceptualizing can lead to either outcome. The model builds on an earlier theory of the “adjacent possible”, defined in the article as “all those things—ideas, words, songs, molecules, genomes, technologies and so on—that are one step away from what actually exists.” This ties in with the Objectivist view that integration of existing conceptual and perceptual data occurs in discrete steps.
Although this model neither contradicts nor extends the Objectivist theory of concept formation, it sheds light on the actual process by which new concepts and ideas originate and propagate within a society or culture.
This model ties in with the Objectivist view of conceptualizing, which Ayn Rand describes as “an actively sustained process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one’s perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sum.” –Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Ethics.
According to the authors, their model applies both to novelties - “they are new to an individual” – and to innovations - “they are new to the world.” Conceptualizing can lead to either outcome. The model builds on an earlier theory of the “adjacent possible”, defined in the article as “all those things—ideas, words, songs, molecules, genomes, technologies and so on—that are one step away from what actually exists.” This ties in with the Objectivist view that integration of existing conceptual and perceptual data occurs in discrete steps.
Although this model neither contradicts nor extends the Objectivist theory of concept formation, it sheds light on the actual process by which new concepts and ideas originate and propagate within a society or culture.
The reason this is valuable is that once a solution is developed, it is optimized by the industry. As the optimal solution is developed, narrower and narrower views are taken and the risk is driven out of that local minima solution to minimize cost, a process capitalistic industry is excellent at. People fail to look at alternates because it is disruptive, just like people never look up when walking around.
An interesting company tried to develop a semantic engine and logical process to reduce the basic process being worked to the fundamentals, and then match it against wide ranging alternatives. Goldfire Innovator by Invention Machines did this. I thought it was great, but we did not invest in it (boo hoo). It also contained an excellent natural language interface around this semantic engine that could search in a contextually relevant manner (vs keywords). For example it could distinguish between a hydrogen environment for annealing and hydrogen in an annealing process. Very powerful. I forget who bought these guys, but they did good work.
Funny you should bring that up.
Looks like Dobrein did too before someone else came along.
Like I said, I'm more concerned with Insull and pyramidazition, the early power companies, and control without ownership.
But his research went way beyond what has found its way into everyday use. He is the recognized inventor of the brushless AC induction motor, radio, remote control by radio, super-conductivity, fluorescent lighting, the bladeless turbine engine and pump, the capacitor discharge ignition system for automobile engines, the mechanical oscillator, and dozens of other inventions. But he also discovered that useful energy could be extracted from the heat of the ambient air, and that electric power in the form of Radiant Energy could be broadcast to everyone in the world through the ground.
And if you do that, you would need to add Edison, who was simply an inventor, more than a thinker. He had a sign in his lab: "There's a better way; find it!!"
If someone disagrees with me, that's fine, he/she can always post his criticism. If he/she disagrees with SCIENCE, that would make it very hard to refute my comments. Another thing altogether.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.00994.pdf
The actual title of the paper described in the article is Dynamics on expanding spaces: modeling the emergence of novelties. The authors use the terms “novelty” and “innovation” somewhat interchangeably, and in a manner that encompasses more than technological breakthroughs and inventions. “Innovations occur throughout social, biological and technological systems and, though we perceive them as a very natural ingredient of our human experience, little is known about the processes determining their emergence. Still the statistical occurrence of innovations shows striking regularities that represent a starting point to get a deeper insight in the whole phenomenology. This paper represents a small step in that direction . . . “
Are you one of the MIT professors who developed the model?
"One of these is Heaps’ law, which states that the number of new things increases at a rate that is sublinear"
-This is clearly wrong when it comes to inventions. First of all the rate is not constant through out history. Second the rate of potential inventions grows combinatorially with respect to new inventions.
Heap's and Zipf’s law are about words not new technologies and I think they are stretching to suggest that they apply outside of language.
"he model accurately predicts how edit events occur on Wikipedia pages, the emergence of tags in social annotation systems, the sequence of words in texts, and how humans discover new songs in online music catalogues"
-what does this have to do with innovation? Another poor use of language. People love to throw around the word innovation, but, as this article shows, it has become almost meaningless. Discovering new songs in online music catalogs is innovation??????
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