The Beneficial Role of Mobility for the Emergence of Innovation

Abstract

Innovation is a key ingredient for the evolution of several systems, including social and biological ones. Focused investigations and lateral thinking may lead to innovation, as well as serendipity and other random discovery processes. Some individuals are talented at proposing innovation (say innovators), while others at deeply exploring proposed novelties, at getting further insights on a theory, or at developing products, services, and so on (say developers). This separation in terms of innovators and developers raises an issue of paramount importance: under which conditions a system is able to maintain innovators? According to a simple model, this work investigates the evolutionary dynamics that characterize the emergence of innovation. In particular, we consider a population of innovators and developers, in which agents form small groups whose composition is crucial for their payoff. The latter depends on the heterogeneity of the formed groups, on the amount of innovators they include, and on an award-factor that represents the policy of the system for promoting innovation. Under the hypothesis that a "mobility" effect may support the emergence of innovation, we compare the equilibria reached by our population in different cases. Results confirm the beneficial role of "mobility", and the emergence of further interesting phenomena.Innovation 1 appears to be an ubiquitary concept, which applies to a variety of contexts, including economy, physics, sociology, ethology, biology, and linguistics 2-15 . A typical setting able to support innovation requires a component, e.g., a research group, whose specific goal is to produce a breakthrough -which in turn is a precondition to find out new technologies, services, and even forms of art 16 . As such, the capability of producing innovation becomes also an indicator of the wellness of a society [17][18][19] . On the other hand, in its pure form, innovation is in fact an unexpected outcome, most likely due to random guessing, lateral thinking or serendipity. The most prominent examples of this kind of mechanism can be found in science, where innovation is fundamental for promoting groundbreaking intuitions 20 . In this context innovation is motivated by the goal of dealing with unsolved problems and sometimes carries out, as side-effect, the emergence of new research fields. A relevant and recent example is constituted by the modern and vibrant field of complex networks [21][22][23][24] , which is deeply affecting several scientific sectors (just to cite few among many: social networks 25 , epidemiology 26 , genomics 27 , neuroscience 28,29 , and financial systems 30 ). Regardless from the underlying context, the ability of identifying objective measures for innovation is a primary issue. A relevant discipline for this purpose is scientometrics, which is concerned with studying, measuring and analysing science, technology and innovation. Narrowing to scientific publications, scientometrics is the reference discipline for measuring their impact on the corresponding rese...

Direct reciprocity and model-predictive rationality explain network reciprocity over social ties

“…Note that the novelty is not strictly in the use of a non-imitative, also called innovative , rule for strategy update, as the best response is itself innovative. Moreover, there has recently been a growing interest for innovative rules 59,60 and for the coexistence 61 and competition 62 between imitative and innovative rules. So far, however, no innovative update showed any significant network effect on cooperation 53,59 , at the point that network reciprocity is often considered a feature of imitative dynamics only 61 .…”

Complex evolutionary dynamics due to punishment and free space in ecological multigames

“…One of such altruistic variables is free space. Lots of earlier investigations deal with free space using the concept of mobility from different perspectives [44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54]. Nevertheless, the explanatory charitable role of free space in the realm of evolutionary game theory has been less explored till now.…”

The evolution of knowledge within and across fields in modern physics

“…Knowledge is in fact created through combination and integration of different concepts, and can benefits from social interactions and interdisciplinary collaborations. Recent works have explored from many angles how knowledge flows across scholars [1][2][3][4][5] , institutions [6][7][8][9] and disciplines [10][11][12] . In particular, it has been shown that knowledge exchange across fields can influence the evolution of culture and language 13,14 , strengthen multi-faceted cooperation 3,15 , and drive the innovation and development of science [16][17][18][19] .…”