Vittorio Loreto at Sapienza University Rome in Italy and his friends have created the first mathematical model that can accurately reproduce the patterns that innovations follow.
The article by Emerging Technology from the arXiv in the MIT Technology Review is an eyeopener. It is not that I understood the mathematics behind their discovery but the underlying idea of “adjacent possible” proposed by complexity theorist Stuart Kauffmann in 2002, an idea that was put forth to explain Biological evolution, coupled with laws like Zipf’s law, Heaps law and Polya’s Urn – seem to explain varied phenomenas – from rich-get-richer, novelties and innovations.
“The team has also shown that its model predicts how innovations appear in the real world. The 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.” writes the author.
It is interesting to think about an universal model that would explain all innovation and the possibilities that it can unleash for the problems facing the world.
Where I learnt it #214 Mathematical Model Reveals the Patterns of How Innovations Arise
