Measuring Novelty by Simulating Discovery

• In Event: 4442 - The Economic Sociology of Culture and Technology

Abstract

Novelty assessment is central to the study and management of innovation. Here we survey and systematize ex ante measures of novelty. New technologies, discoveries and cultural products are deemed novel insofar as they seem unlikely, conditional on perceptions of prior knowledge and simulations of the inventive process. This implies that novelty has different manifestations in fields with distinct prior knowledge and processes of invention; consequently, different novelty measures may be appropriate for different fields. We array existing novelty measures according to the speed of simulated search and the complexity of the space over which search is simulated. Using data from 176,192 U.S. patents granted in 2000, we demonstrate that inventive fields vary in their distribution of novelty measures and that familiar impact-based correlates of novelty are predicted by distinct characterizations of novelty in different fields. Consistent with our hypothesis that different inventive processes imply different novelty measures, we find that nearby fields have more similar "profiles" in the relationship between novelty and impact. We conclude by detailing the frontier of novelty measurement and emphasizing the importance of careful measure selection for credible analyses of innovation.

Authors

• Jacob Gates Foster, University of California-Los Angeles

• Feng Shi, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• James A. Evans, University of Chicago