Please join us for the next event in the DINS Seminar Series!
Pathway of Innovation
Speaker: Hyejin Youn, Associate Professor, Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
March 29, 2023
11:00 am -- 12 noon
In person -- Room 538-539 Conference Rooms in 130 North Bellefield Avenue (across the street from the IS Building). Refreshments will be served.
To attend virtually, Join Zoom Meeting https://pitt.zoom.us/j/93680987565
Abstract: Is innovation dominated by individual actions or should it be understood as a collective process to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts? Innovation that brings about new knowledge is
often described as individual search processes, exploiting and exploring a complex landscape of concepts, ideas, and items to find their novel connections. Then, where does the complex landscape come from? As we search the space individually, the landscape is collectively structured, maintained by, and shared with the society, which further down to open up new adjacent possible or close down existing possibilities to individuals' future invention activities. Such co-evolution of constraints explains the full of contingent and idiosyncratic cases, resulting in the unpredictable nature of innovation. Innovation is path dependent. However, what if past-paths are well-understood? Does this mean we can predict the future innovation from the past innovation? It is indeed the case that there has been evidences of predictive innovations that contradict the very premises of innovation. Here we construct a stochastic model of co-evolution between individual actions and the landscape. The landscape is an accumulation of our collective past paths. Our model shows individual activities who have incentive to be aligned often create a convention toward a paradigm, becoming an increasing inertia moving toward a particular dynamic direction at a larger scale than that of individual dynamics. As a result, the landscape becomes more modular and rugged structure. By constructing an innovation phase diagram of counter-factual spaces, and by analyzing two independent empirical datasets – almost two centuries of the U.S. patents and four decades of scientific publications – we demonstrate that both science and technology evolve at the edge between the exploitation strategy and exploration strategy. We show the individual innovative process shapes the underlying knowledge landscape, but also their future actions are shaped by the very landscape they have been shaping. Such co-evolution processes between individuals and the collective structure seem to leave and pave the path-dependent trajectory of innovation, which explains predictable innovation.
Bio: Dr. Youn is an Associate Professor, Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). She is also an external faculty at Santa Fe Institute. Her research aims to develop a mathematical and computational framework to understand complex systems.