ABS: Ebeling, Evolutionary models of innovation dynamics

[Gretchen Whitney]

Andrea Scharnhorst : e-mail: as at medea.wz-berlin.de

This paper is written by two of our colleagues from Germany and members of
who are closely connected with the work of Manfred Bonitz of Dresden,
Germany.


TITLE:          Evolutionary models of innovation dynamics (Article,
                English)
AUTHOR:         Ebeling, W; Scharnhorst, A
SOURCE:         TRAFFIC AND GRANULAR FLOW'99. 2000. p.43-56
                SPRINGER-VERLAG BERLIN, BERLIN

SEARCH TERM(S):  CJ SCIENTOMETRICS

KEYWORDS+:       DIFFUSION; SCIENCE; SUBSTITUTION; LOCALIZATION;
                CONSEQUENCE; LANDSCAPES

ABSTRACT:       We investigate the dynamics of social processes and, in
particular, processes of innovation in socio-economical evolution,
technological change, and scientific research in discrete and continuous
state spaces. The discrete description is based on the occupation number
formalism and transition probabilities (Master equation formalism). Our
special attention is devoted to the creation and survival of the NEW
(i.e., new behavior, new technologies, new ideas etc.). The second
(continuous) model is based on the idea that evolution is hill-climbing
in an adaptive landscape over a continuous characteristics space. The
behavior of an individual, a technological product, or a scientific
problem is described by a large number of characteristics covering
behavioral aspects, technology-inherent and economic parameters, or
thematic dimensions. Further, we define a real-valued multi-modal fitness
function/functional and a population density over the characteristics
space. The evolutionary dynamics including competition and innovations is
modeled by reaction-diffusion equations of Fisher-Eigen or Lotka-Volterra
type.

AUTHOR ADDRESS: W Ebeling, Humboldt Univ, Inst Theoret Phys, Invalidenstr
                110, D-10115 Berlin, Germany

-------------------------------------------
(c) ISI, Reprinted with permission
Please visit their website at www.isinet.com