Innovation as a nonlinear process, the scientometric perspective, and the specification of an ‘innovation opportunities explorer’

Abstract

The process of innovation follows nonlinear patterns across the domains of science, technology, and the economy. Novel bibliometric mapping techniques can be used to investigate and represent distinctive, but complementary perspectives on the innovation process (e.g. ‘demand’ and ‘supply’) as well as the interactions among these perspectives using animations. In a map, the different perspectives can be represented as ‘continents’ of data related to varying extents over time. For example, the different branches of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in the Medline database provide sources of such perspectives (e.g. ‘Diseases’ vs ‘Drugs and Chemicals’). The multiple-perspective approach enables us to reconstruct facets of the dynamics of innovation, in terms of selection mechanisms shaping localisable trajectories and/or resulting in more globalised regimes. By expanding the data with patents and scholarly publications, we demonstrate the use of this multi-perspective approach in the case of RNA Interference (RNAi). The possibility to develop an ‘Innovation Opportunities Explorer’ is specified.

Keywords:

• innovation
• data-mining
• scientometrics
• network analysis
• database
• mapping

Acknowledgements

We thank Ismael Rafols for comments on a previous draft, and acknowledge support by the ESRC project ‘Mapping the Dynamics of Emergent Technologies’ (RES-360-25-0076).

Notes

The tenth edition of the Science, Technology, and Technology Scoreboard (2011), entitled ‘Innovation and Growth in Knowledge Economies’, is available at http://www.oecd.org/document/10/0,3746,en_2649_33703_39493962_1_1_1_1,00.html

The statistics portal ‘Science, Technology, and Patents’ of the OECD can be found at http://stats.oecd.org/

Free after the motto of the Chicago World's Fair of 1933: ‘Science discovers, genius invents, industry applies, and man adapts himself to, or is molded by, new things \ldots. Individuals, groups, entire races of men fall into step with science and industry’.

The MeSH classification is organised in a hierarchical tree covering 16 separate branches as: ‘Anatomy’, ‘Organisms’, ‘Diseases’, ‘Chemicals and Drugs’, ‘Analytical, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment’, ‘Psychiatry and Psychology’, ‘Phenomena and Processes’, ‘Disciplines and Occupations’, ‘Anthropology, Education, Sociology and Social Phenomena’, ‘Technology, Industry, Agriculture’, ‘Humanities’, ‘Information Science’, ‘Named Groups’, ‘Health Care’, Publication Characteristics’ and ‘Geographicals’.

We used the following search string for the retrieval: ‘((((siRNA[Title/Abstract]) OR RNAi[Title/Abstract]) OR interference RNA[Title/Abstract]) OR RNA interference[Title/Abstract]) OR miRNA[Title/Abstract]) OR micro RNA[Title/Abstract]) OR interfering RNA[Title/Abstract])’.