FGSES Professor Mathieu Charbonneau will lead this week's AIRESS Research Seminar on “Combinatorial Invention and the Evolution of Technology” on Wednesday, February 26th at 12:30 p.m.

Professor Charbonneau will present a framework showing how the challenge of interfacing components gives rise to multiple concurrent technological traditions, impacting the dynamics of combinatorial technological evolution.

ABSTRACT:

Combinatorial invention—the process by which new technologies emerge through the combination of existing ones—is central to technological evolution yet remains poorly understood. Central to the processes of technological change is the capacity to combine existing technologies into new ones. In the last 30 years or so, economists and computational social scientists have focused on the evolutionary dynamics resulting from individuals capable of such combinatorial invention. This is done by modelling combinatorial invention as a stochastic process where existing technologies randomly combine in a lock-and-key manner. What these studies overlook is that existing technologies rarely combine seamlessly nor randomly. Not any precursor technologies can be usefully combined with any other, and when they can, they typically require carefully designing interfaces between them to ensure they can function together as intended. Here, I develop a framework that reveals how the challenge of interfacing components generates multiple concurrent technological traditions, and how this impacts the dynamics of combinatorial technological evolution and challenges existing understanding and modelling strategies.