Seminars & Lectures
| * TITLE | How exploitation and exploration shape the knowledge space | ||||||
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| * DATE / TIME | 2020-06-12, 15:00-16:00 | ||||||
| * ABSTRACT | |||||||
| Innovation has been achieved through the combination of concepts in knowledge space. In this combinatorial process, existing concepts are reused (exploitation) and new concepts are created (exploration) to discover new possibilities. While both exploitation and exploration are essential to make a breakthrough, innovators often do not solely rely on a single strategy because biased strategies can reduce the impact of innovation as they are too conventional or novel. The trade-off between exploitation and exploration thus leads innovators to employ a strategy that exploitation and exploration are mixed. The mixed-strategy is accumulated in and changes the structure of knowledge space where innovators find concepts to be combined, and in turn affects the strategy itself in the future. Despite the importance of the trade-off on knowledge space, we know little about how the trade-off shapes and co-evolves with knowledge space. We here present a network growth model that incorporates exploitation and exploration to investigate the role of the trade-off in the evolution of knowledge space. If exploitation and exploration are balanced, our model reproduces structural properties of two empirical knowledge spaces that were constructed from the US patents and academic papers. In particular with a balanced trade-off, modular structure emerges in model networks, suggesting that knowledge domains what we take for granted would be outcomes of collective behaviors that balance exploitation and exploration. The findings imply that microscopic behaviors that exploit and explore concepts contribute to macroscopic structure of knowledge space. | |||||||
