[Sigmetrics] What is a complex innovation system?

[Sylvan Katz]

What is a complex innovation system? 
<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0156150>

J. Sylvan Katz 
<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=nx4kZtIAAAAJ&hl=en>

Innovation systems are sometimes referred to as complex systems, 
something that is intuitively understood but poorly defined. A complex 
system dynamically evolves in non-linear ways giving it unique 
properties that distinguish it from other systems. In particular, a 
common signature of complex systems is scale-invariant emergent 
properties. A scale-invariant property can be identified because it is 
solely described by a power law function, f(x) = kx^α , where the 
exponent, α, is a measure of scale-invariance. The focus of this paper 
is to describe and illustrate that innovation systems have properties of 
a complex adaptive system. In particular scale-invariant emergent 
properties indicative of their complex nature that can be quantified and 
used to inform public policy. The global research system is an example 
of an innovation system. Peer-reviewed publications containing knowledge 
are a characteristic output. Citations or references to these articles 
are an indirect measure of the impact the knowledge has on the research 
community. Peer-reviewed papers indexed in Scopus and in the Web of 
Science were used as data sources to produce measures of sizes and 
impact. These measures are used to illustrate how scale-invariant 
properties can be identified and quantified. It is demonstrated that the 
distribution of impact has a reasonable likelihood of being 
scale-invariant with scaling exponents that tended toward a value of 
less than 3.0 with the passage of time and decreasing group sizes. 
Scale-invariant correlations are shown between the evolution of impact 
and size with time and between field impact and sizes at points in time. 
The recursive or self-similar nature of scale-invariance suggests that 
any smaller innovation system within the global research system is 
likely to be complex with scale-invariant properties too.

Katz, J. Sylvan. (2016). What Is a Complex Innovation System?
PLoS ONE, 11(6), e0156150.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0156150
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0156150

-- 
Sylvan Katz
Associate Faculty
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/sylvank/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.asis.org/pipermail/sigmetrics/attachments/20160608/44fec064/attachment-0001.html>