Collective Creativity in Scientific Communities

Abstract

Innovation is the driving force of personal growth, national wealth and social progress. Significant attention has been given to advancing cyber infrastructures, but little is known about their factors, as well as their interaction in producing the context that contributes to creating innovation. It is widely accepted that in open scientific communities, organizational creativity and innovation rate is high. So it is significantly important to analyze such communities in order to better understand their mode of operation. Our objective in this study is to use agent simulation as a computational laboratory to understand the innovation potential of scientific communities. The simulation model serves as a useful thinking tool for policy analysis to foster innovation in scientific communities. The simulation results show that centrality, as a measure of degree of connectedness, exhibits positive correlation with innovation in exploration-oriented and utility-oriented community but negative correlation in service-oriented community. Additionally utility-oriented communities have social network with low density and high centrality, which suggest high potential for innovation.