The virtue of innovation: innovation through the lenses of biological evolution

Abstract

We rehearse the processes of innovation and discovery in general terms, using as our main metaphor the biological concept of an evolutionary fitness landscape. Incremental and disruptive innovations are seen, respectively, as successful searches carried out locally or more widely. They may also be understood as reflecting evolution by mutation (incremental) versus recombination (disruptive). We also bring a platonic view, focusing on virtue and memory. We use ‘virtue’ as a measure of efforts, including the knowledge required to come up with disruptive and incremental innovations, and ‘memory’ as a measure of their lifespan, i.e. how long they are remembered. Fostering innovation, in the evolutionary metaphor, means providing the wherewithal to promote novelty, good objective functions that one is trying to optimize, and means to improve one's knowledge of, and ability to navigate, the landscape one is searching. Recombination necessarily implies multi- or inter-disciplinarity. These principles are generic to all kinds of creativity, novel ideas formation and the development of new products and technologies.

Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies

“…This is important because a major distinction between biology and culture/technology is the latter's (apparent) goal-oriented, rapid generation and filtering of ideas and inventions (the sensory and cognition box in figure 1; see also [100]). Indeed, there is evidence that some innovations in culture/technology stem from serendipitous events [101,102]. In biology, novelties are similarly difficult if not impossible to predict [103,104].…”

Control of metabolite efflux in microbial cell factories: current advances and future prospects

“…In the past, and partly because of the enormous number of possible sequences [374][375][376] this was done rather empirically, using methods such as error-prone PCR (ePCR) [377][378][379] to introduce mutations. Although showing the utility of the general directed evolution strategy, this had three highly undesirable consequences: (i) there was no control over which mutations were made, (ii) the search could only be local, as high mutation rates necessarily introduced stop codons [379,380], and (iii) the reliance on selection of local 'winners' as starting points for the next generation inevitably meant that search was soon trapped in local minima from which it was impossible to escape (as was evident from many published studies showing a lack of further improvement after 3 or so generations, despite quite poor k cat values) [324].…”

“…The conceptual solution, well known to those studying evolutionary and related algorithms for purposes of optimisation (e.g. [324,376,[381][382][383][384][385]), is that one has to combine exploitation (local search) with exploration (wider forays), and that consequently it can be helpful to know where one is in the search space (i.e. the genotype [262,386]).…”

Creativity: linchpin in the quest for a viable theory of cultural evolution

“…There is literature on cross-cultural differences in creativity [1][2][3], the adaptive value of creativity and how human creativity evolved [4][5][6][7], as well as efforts to frame creativity as a Darwinian [8,9] 1 and a nonDarwinian [11,12] evolutionary process. However, with some exceptions [13][14][15], there is a dearth of research on the implications of how the creative process works for the question of how culture evolves. This appears to be an outstanding gap in the literature given that creativity is what fuels cultural evolution, and a theory of cultural evolution could provide an integrative framework for the social sciences in much the same way that fragmentary biological knowledge was unified by Darwin's theory of natural selection (and subsequently unified further by the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and research on epigenetic processes and complex systems [16,17]).…”