ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2015
Invention as a combinatorial process: evidence from US patents.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed.
- A CD index guided ensemble framework for screening potentially disruptive patent candidates in artificial intelligence.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Structural characteristics and evolutionary trajectories of knowledge recombination in the field of AI-driven drug discovery.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The institutional dynamics of inequality for women inventors who break with conventional thinking.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Scaling laws for function diversity and specialization across socioeconomic and biological complex systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
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- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Technological complexity and combinatorial invention in small-scale societies.Science advances · 2025Article
- An information-theoretic foreshadowing of mathematicians' sudden insights.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Mutual benefits of social learning and algorithmic mediation for cumulative culture.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Decoding the Biobased Blueprint: Key Players and Evolutionary Trends in Materials Innovation.Polymers · 2025Article
- Comparative analysis of technological fitness and coherence at different geographical scales.PloS one · 2025Article
- Information consumption and firm size.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- 3.3 million years of stone tool complexity suggests that cumulative culture began during the Middle Pleistocene.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Idea engines: Unifying innovation & obsolescence from markets & genetic evolution to science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- 12,000-year-old spindle whorls and the innovation of wheeled rotational technologies.PloS one · 2024Article
- Group Coordination Catalyzes Individual and Cultural Intelligence.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- The geography of technological innovation dynamics.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Machine culture.Nature human behaviour · 2023Review
- Surprising combinations of research contents and contexts are related to impact and emerge with scientific outsiders from distant disciplines.Nature communications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Invention has been commonly conceptualized as a search over a space of combinatorial possibilities. Despite the existence of a rich literature, spanning a variety of disciplines, elaborating on the recombinant nature of invention, we lack a formal and quantitative characterization of the combinatorial process underpinning inventive activity. Here, we use US patent records dating from 1790 to 2010 to formally characterize invention as a combinatorial process. To do this, we treat patented inventions as carriers of technologies and avail ourselves of the elaborate system of technology codes used by the United States Patent and Trademark Office to classify the technologies responsible for an invention's novelty. We find that the combinatorial inventive process exhibits an invariant rate of 'exploitation' (refinements of existing combinations of technologies) and 'exploration' (the development of new technological combinations). This combinatorial dynamic contrasts sharply with the creation of new technological capabilities-the building blocks to be combined-that has significantly slowed down. We also find that, notwithstanding the very reduced rate at which new technologies are introduced, the generation of novel technological combinations engenders a practically infinite space of technological configurations.
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