Mathematical Model Reveals the Patterns of How Innovations Arise

This work could lead to a new approach to the study of what is possible, and how it follows from what already exists.

Their goal is to understand how innovation happens and the factors that drive it so that they can optimize conditions for future innovation.

Today, all that changes thanks to the work of Vittorio Loreto at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy and a few pals, who have created the first mathematical model that accurately reproduces the patterns that innovations follow.

Another well-known statistical pattern in innovation is Zipf’s law, which describes how the frequency of an innovation is related to its popularity.

While mathematicians can model innovation by simply plugging the observed numbers into equations, they would much rather have a model which produces these numbers from first principles.

That’s because the Polya urn model allows for all the expected consequences of innovation but does not account for all the unexpected consequences of how an innovation influences the adjacent possible.

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

Source: Mathematical Model Reveals the Patterns of How Innovations Arise

Originally published at Cogly.