Exploring the Impact of Social Communication on the Innovation Potential of Open Science Communities

Authored by Levent Yilmaz, Guangyu Zou

Date Published: 2016

DOI: 10.1109/tsmc.2015.2455956

Sponsors: United States National Science Foundation (NSF)

Platforms: Repast

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

As scientific communities become increasingly complex and interdisciplinary, implementing policies that foster collective creativity for science-based innovation emerges as a critical issue. In this paper, we investigate the impact of socio-communication strategies on innovation capacity based on experiments using a general-purpose model that aims to study dynamic processes of collective creativity in scientific communities. Experimental results indicate that low communication frequency, openness and receptivity lead to higher variety. On the contrary, variety decreases with increasing receptivity under high communication frequency. If more communication channels exist, the connectivity-driven preferential attachment strategy is beneficial in fostering innovation in terms of generated networks with low density and high centrality. Additionally, balance theory suggests higher levels of knowledge diffusion efficiency.

Tags

networks systems Organization