Patterns in Innovation: What Math reveals about how to innovate — a summary.

Nova
Nova
Nov 1 · 3 min read

Each innovation changes our business ecosystem and our lives. Each possible innovation creates a new future scope of possibilities. So every time visionaries and entrepreneurs explore and idea the space of unexplored possibilities — the adjacent possible — is changing.

It’s the reason why at Nova we want to simplify the innovation process keeping in mind all the pieces that make innovation possible.

The other day Steve Banton shared this blog post on our #Slack channel and we wanted to share it with you today.

The blog post is about How Mathematical Model Can Reveal the Patterns of How Innovations works. Pretty Cool!

Here are a summary from the blogs post:

Graphic from — MIT Technology Review Blog

“ Loreto and his pals wanted to create a model that explains the statistical pattern in innovation for the first time.

They begin with a well-known mathematical sandbox called Polya’s Urn. It starts with an urn filled with balls with different colors. A ball is withdrawn at random, inspected and placed back in the urn with a number of other balls of the same color, thereby increasing the likelihood that this color will be selected in the future.

Loreto, Strogatz, and co have modified Polya’s urn model to account for the possibility that discovering a new color in the urn can trigger entirely unexpected consequences. They call this model “Polya’s urn with innovation triggering.”

Loreto and co then calculate how the number of new colors picked from the urn, and their frequency distribution changes over time. The result is that the model reproduces Heaps’ and Zipf’s Laws as they appear in the real world — a mathematical first. “The model of Polya’s urn with innovation triggering, presents for the first time a satisfactory first-principle based way of reproducing empirical observations,” say Loreto and co.

The team has also shown that its model predicts how innovations appear in the real world.”

We recommended you to check it out and share your thoughts with us.

If you are interested in developing lateral thinking and your creative skills we recommend the following book.

Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking. Shop Now

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About Nova

Nova is an online collaboration platform with an optimized innovation process & innovation toolkit to bring your ideas to life.

Our platform combines techniques from design thinking, market research, business strategy, project management, lateral thinking, and organizational psychology to help teams to develop ideas, overcome business challenges and find new-cutting edge solutions in the marketplace.

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— Thank you!

Read the Blog Post Here!

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1701.00994: Dynamics on Expanding Spaces: Modeling the Emergence of Novelties

Ref: https://www.technologyreview.com

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