Agent-based modeling has proven effective in increasing the understanding of complex systems, including social-economical systems. A goal of modeling complex systems is to distill the system into simple agents with phenotypes guided by simple rules. The model then displays the emergent behavior of these agents interacting with each other and their environment. An agent-based model of innovation and its place in a global economy or ecosystem is presented. The model utilizes simple agents to represent innovating entities such as large corporations and small companies. The results produced by this model reveal the dynamics of innovation and its role in a global economy. The results indicate a large need for partnership in innovation for those entities working within rapidly changing domains. Domains, such as high technology, have constantly changing market expectations, which force innovating entities to seek external sources of assistance to meet these expectations in a timely enough fashion so as to incur benefit.

Abstract:The global marketplace over the past decade has called for innovative products and cost reduction. This perplexing duality has led companies to seek external collaborations to effectively deliver innovative products to market. External collaboration often leads to innovation at reduced research and development expenditure. This is especially true of companies which find the most authoritative entity (usually a company or even a person) to work with. Authoritativeness accelerates development and research-to-product transformation due to the inherent knowledge of the authoritative entity. This paper offers a novel approach to automatically determine the authoritativeness of entities for collaboration. This approach automatically discovers an authoritative entity in a domain of interest. The methodology presented utilizes web mining, text mining, and generation of an authoritativeness metric. The concepts discussed in the paper are illustrated with a case study of mining the authoritativeness of collaboration partners for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract