Abstract:
Innovation processes are critical for preserving and improving our standard of living. While innovation has been studied by many disciplines, the focus has been on qualitative measures that are specific to a single technological domain. I adopt a quantitative approach to investigate underlying regularities that generalize across multiple domains. I use a novel approach to better understand the innovation process by combining computational models with empirical data on software development, on one hand, and the evolution of the English lexicon on the other. Innovation can be viewed as the recombination and mutation of existing building blocks. I focus on how building blocks are used to generate innovations. The building blocks are pieces of code (e.g., functions or objects) for the software development data and words for the written language. These data lie at extremes of time scales: innovation occurring over the course of a few days or a week in the case of software while language evolution occurs over decades or centuries. This allows the examination of innovation processes that range from highly-constrained to completely open-ended. Computational methods reinforce the findings from the data analyses and permit exploration of the general features of innovation processes through the construction of abstract models.
