Portal:Complex Systems Digital Campus/E-Laboratory on Innovation, Learning and Co-evolution

Portal:Complex_Systems_Digital_Campus/E-Laboratory_on_Innovation, Learning and Co-evolution Innovation, learning and co-evolution

Novelty in complex systems appears under a variety of processes, through the emergence of new entities and new categories, through the modification of interaction processes, through changes of their temporal or spatial scales, through their dynamical transformation. Within a complex system science perspective, the main question is to know whether the modes of change are comparable when going from natural and artificial towards social systems. A first challenge is to identify which dynamic conditions are favorable to innovation. Is innovation always associated to jumps, ruptures or bifurcations, or can it proceed from more regular trends? Which processes are explaining the frequent observation of innovation cycles? A second challenge is to determine whether there is an acceleration of innovation in human society through time, by identifying relevant measures of societal changes. A third challenge is to understand how intention and reflection are framing the innovation in social systems and how the feedback effect of learning affects individual and collective cognition over historical time.

Grand challenges:

1. Understanding dynamic conditions of innovation 2. Modeling innovations and their rhythms 3. Understanding the relation between cognition and innovation 1. Understanding the dynamic conditions of innovation Can innovation only be analyzed ex-post, or can it be predicted, from which indicators and explanatory variables? Are the signs that announce the change in a specific regime of the system’s dynamics, through the amplification of fluctuations around a trajectory, through intensification of pre-existing processes, or through the transition between quantitative toward qualitative variations? How innovation becomes accepted, through introducing itself in existing structures or by replacing them, or by inducing modifications of these structures, which make them compatible? Which relationships are established between new artefacts, new functionalities and the new practices that use them? What kind of factors the learning processes have to combine in order to link these different aspects together? How can be explained the formation of subsets of many innovations which lead to the observation of large cycles in the evolution? 2. Modeling innovations and their rhythms Certain analysts suggest that there is an acceleration of the production frequency of innovations, especially through the technical revolutions and the evolution towards a society of information. Is this observation a reality or an illusion? Answering that question requires a rigorous definition of innovation and of information and careful determination of the time intervals that measure its frequency. How to build reference times that are relevant for characterizing the rhythms of emergence, succession and co-presence of innovations? In other words, is the regular hour time meaningful or should one imagine other measures of societal time? 3. Understanding the relation between cognition and innovation Societies build and assimilate innovations that concern as well the artefacts that they produce as their own practices and the institutions they create. Is it possible to understand the social dynamics of innovation without introducing the individual and collective intentionality and reflexivity? Is social innovation in continuity or in rupture with biological evolution? Does the fact that innovation is targeted, that the selection of innovation is guided, that the processes of learning and acceptance are conveyed through legal, economic or cultural regulations introduce different characteristics and effects for innovation in human societies? Within these processes, is it possible to identify at meso-levels social milieux or networks or geographical spaces that would be more favorable to innovation, or loaded with a specific innovative capacity? What are the expressions of the interactions between innovation and individual cognition? Can the social control on innovation reach as far as the biological transformations?