The Innovation Paradox: Concept Space Expansion with Diminishing Originality and the Promise of Creative AI
This addresses the innovation slowdown problem for technology and patent researchers, highlighting a potential role for creative AI, though it is incremental in analyzing existing data.
The study analyzed TechNet, a semantic network of over four million concepts from patents, finding that technological concept space expands linearly, not exponentially, with declining originality in new concepts, attributed to human cognitive limits.
Innovation, typically spurred by reusing, recombining, and synthesizing existing concepts, is expected to result in an exponential growth of the concept space over time. However, our statistical analysis of TechNet, which is a comprehensive technology semantic network encompassing over four million concepts derived from patent texts, reveals a linear rather than exponential expansion of the overall technological concept space. Moreover, there is a notable decline in the originality of newly created concepts. These trends can be attributed to the constraints of human cognitive abilities to innovate beyond an ever-growing space of prior art, among other factors. Integrating creative artificial intelligence (CAI) into the innovation process holds the potential to overcome these limitations and alter the observed trends in the future.