Is knowledge production scalable? Understanding tacit knowledge in innovation
Presented by Lingfei Wu (Pittsburgh)
Since Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, scale economies have been one of the most prominent principles—the increasing productivity and lowering cost driving the emergence of companies, cities, and countries. As the 21st century continues to unfold, this principle has been extended from the production of goods and services to a latent, but increasingly more important component of our economy—the production of knowledge.
The exciting, superlinear growth of knowledge with population is observed both offline in universities and cities and also online, including Wikipedia, Github, Quora, StackOverflow. However, is this the full story? Will scientific and technological innovation always scale up easily and nicely and all we need is to watch the magic happen?
I will start by summarizing my years of exploration on scale economies in online knowledge markets, after which I will introduce my 2019 Nature paper on scale diseconomies, a turning point in my academic thinking and career. In this work, I posed the question of whether an additional team member always increases the chance of creating better ideas collectively.
My analysis of 65 million teams that contributed to scientific discovery, patent invention, and software development from the past century demonstrated that smaller teams disrupted science and technology with radically new ideas, whereas larger teams developed existing ones. Therefore, for the flourishing of science and technology ecology and the prosperity of our knowledge economy, individual innovators and small teams should also be supported, together with large teams working on “big sciences”.
I will conclude by demonstrating a few ongoing projects in understanding why innovation fails to scale up, in particular, how the slow diffusion of tacit knowledge may cause people to get stuck in places and times, and make the intellectual change and opportunity equalizing more challenging than expected.
SoDa Labs webinar series
The SoDa Labs webinar series provides a platform for researchers around the world to present work that uses novel and alternative data and/or tools from data science and beyond to answer social science questions.
Event Details
- Date:
- 22 June 2021 at 9:00 am – 10:00 am
- Venue:
- Online
- Categories:
- General; SoDa Labs; SoDa Labs Webinars
Description
Presented by Lingfei Wu (Pittsburgh)
Since Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, scale economies have been one of the most prominent principles—the increasing productivity and lowering cost driving the emergence of companies, cities, and countries. As the 21st century continues to unfold, this principle has been extended from the production of goods and services to a latent, but increasingly more important component of our economy—the production of knowledge.
The exciting, superlinear growth of knowledge with population is observed both offline in universities and cities and also online, including Wikipedia, Github, Quora, StackOverflow. However, is this the full story? Will scientific and technological innovation always scale up easily and nicely and all we need is to watch the magic happen?
I will start by summarizing my years of exploration on scale economies in online knowledge markets, after which I will introduce my 2019 Nature paper on scale diseconomies, a turning point in my academic thinking and career. In this work, I posed the question of whether an additional team member always increases the chance of creating better ideas collectively.
My analysis of 65 million teams that contributed to scientific discovery, patent invention, and software development from the past century demonstrated that smaller teams disrupted science and technology with radically new ideas, whereas larger teams developed existing ones. Therefore, for the flourishing of science and technology ecology and the prosperity of our knowledge economy, individual innovators and small teams should also be supported, together with large teams working on “big sciences”.
I will conclude by demonstrating a few ongoing projects in understanding why innovation fails to scale up, in particular, how the slow diffusion of tacit knowledge may cause people to get stuck in places and times, and make the intellectual change and opportunity equalizing more challenging than expected.
SoDa Labs webinar series
The SoDa Labs webinar series provides a platform for researchers around the world to present work that uses novel and alternative data and/or tools from data science and beyond to answer social science questions.
Event Contact
- Name
- SoDaLabs@monash.edu
- Phone
- Organisation