The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Invention as a combinatorial process: evidence from US patents
Open accessAbstract
Invention has been commonly conceptualized as a search over a space of combinatorial possibilities. Despite the existence of a rich literature, spanning a variety of disciplines, elaborating on the recombinant nature of invention, we lack a formal and quantitative characterization of the combinatorial process underpinning inventive activity. Here, we use US patent records dating from 1790 to 2010 to formally characterize invention as a combinatorial process. To do this, we treat patented inventions as carriers of technologies and avail ourselves of the elaborate system of technology codes used by the United States Patent and Trademark Office to classify the technologies responsible for an invention's novelty. We find that the combinatorial inventive process exhibits an invariant rate of ‘exploitation’ (refinements of existing combinations of technologies) and ‘exploration’ (the development of new technological combinations). This combinatorial dynamic contrasts sharply with the creation of new technological capabilities—the building blocks to be combined—that has significantly slowed down. We also find that, notwithstanding the very reduced rate at which new technologies are introduced, the generation of novel technological combinations engenders a practically infinite space of technological configurations.
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Cites
Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning
March, J. G. (1991) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.2.1.71 · Cited by 21,942 · cited 1×
“The language of “exploration” and “exploitation” introduced by March [40] to describe organizational learning as a search process comes to mind when thinking about inventive search.”
BackgroundKnowledge of the firm, combinative capabilities, and the replication of technology
Kogut, B., & Zander, U. (1992) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.3.3.383 · Cited by 12,939
The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution
Kauffman, S. A. (1993) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780195079517.001.0001 · Cited by 7,855
Technological paradigms and technological trajectories
Dosi, G. (1982) · Research Policy · doi:10.1016/0048-7333(82)90016-6 · Cited by 6,685
Erwin, D. H., Laflamme, M., Tweedt, S. M., Sperling, E. A., Pisani, D., & Peterson, K. J. (2011) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1206375 · Cited by 1,336 · cited 1×
“Firstly, only a relatively small number of information building blocks – protein-coding genes – have been involved in the construction of most genomes [41].”
BackgroundMonod, J. (1974) · Studies in the Philosophy of Biology · doi:10.1007/978-1-349-01892-5_20 · Cited by 967
Why does human culture increase exponentially?
Enquist, M., Ghirlanda, S., Jarrick, A., & Wachtmeister, C.-A. (2008) · Theoretical Population Biology · doi:10.1016/j.tpb.2008.04.007 · Cited by 123
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Metadata
- Authors
- Youn, H., Strumsky, D., Bettencourt, L. M. A., & Lobo, J.
- Venue
- Journal of The Royal Society Interface
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2015-05
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 106
- Pages
- 20150272
- ISSN
- 1742-5662 (ISSN-L)
- 1742-5689
- OpenAlex
- W2072002353
- Cited by
- 241
- References
- 7
- FWCI
- 47.57
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
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- Youn, H., Strumsky, D., Bettencourt, L. M. A., & Lobo, J. (2015). Invention as a combinatorial process: evidence from US patents. Journal of The Royal Society Interface. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2015.0272
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
