Radical Novelty Research Articles

Disruption, transformation and silos: medical humanities and the management gurus

To disrupt, to transform and to break through silos are common sense aims for the medical humanities and other interdisciplinary endeavours. These keywords arise because of the influence upon the...

Multidimensional indicators to identify emerging technologies: Perspective of technological knowledge flow

The identification of emerging technologies (ETs) is pivotal for advancing technological innovation. However, current methods fail to sufficiently clarify ETs' innovation mechanisms and lack a consistent perspective to integrate the five attributes proposed by Rotolo. This paper presents an innovative term-level framework to identify and comprehend ETs through the perspective of technological knowledge flow (TKF). By dissecting TKF comprehensively, encompassing aspects of knowledge absorption, growth, and diffusion, we construct and explicate multidimensional indicators reflective of ETs' attributes, including relatively rapid growth, radical novelty, coherence, prominent impact, as well as uncertainty and ambiguity. Through the analysis of digital medical patent dataset, our framework proves effective in assessing emergent scores and pinpointing ETs with specificity at the term level, clarifying their technological components and efficacy. This is beneficial for technology developers to overcome technical difficulties and strategic decision makers to manage IP for competitive advantage.

Atypical combinations of technologies in regional co-inventor networks

Novel combinations of technologies are usually the result of collaborative work that builds on existing knowledge. Albeit inventors and their respective communities tend to be specialized, inventor collaborations across differently specialized peers have the potential to generate co-inventor networks that provide access to a diverse set of knowledge and facilitate the production of radical novelty. Previous research has demonstrated that short access in large co-inventor networks enables innovative outcomes in regional economies. However, how connections in the network across different technological knowledge domains matter and what impact they might generate is still unknown. The present investigation focuses on ‘atypical’ combinations of technologies as indicated in patent documents. In particular, the role of technological specializations linked in co-inventor networks that result in radical innovation in European regions is analyzed. Our results confirm that the share of atypical patents is growing in regions where bridging ties establish short access to and across cohesive co-inventor sub-networks. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that the strong specialization of co-inventor communities in regions fosters atypical combinations because these communities manage to increase the scale and scope of novel combinations. Thus, bridges between communities that are specialized in different technologies favor atypical innovation outcomes. The work shows that not diversity per se, but links across variously specialized inventor communities can foster radical innovation.

It takes two to tango: toward a political concept of responsible innovation

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a political concept of Responsible Innovation (RI). As a first step, we diagnose the RI discourse with a conceptual ambiguity, struggling to accommodate both private and public interests. To address this ambiguity, we distinguish between weak RI, which seeks to govern a techno-economic concept of innovation; and strong RI, which seeks to conceive a political concept of innovation beyond techno-economic ideology and practice. Secondly, we consult The Human Condition, in which Hannah Arendt articulates a threefold distinction between the activities of labor, work, and action. Although Arendt does not explicitly address the topic of innovation, her equation of politics with the human capacity to “begin the unexpected” inspires a political concept of RI which fundamentally empowers the public sphere and drives radical novelty. Finally, we account for how this political concept of RI can be operationalized, advocating for its integration at both substantive and procedural level.

Borislava Efimenkova’s Research of Northern Russian Lamentations as the Beginning of the Ethnomusicological Science of the Gnesins’ Institute

The article is devoted to the research work by the famous Russian ethnomusicologist Borislava Borisovna Efimenkova (1933–1996) Severnorusskaya prichet' [Northern Russian Lamentations], which was published in 1980. The book has become a milestone in the scholarly work of the author herself, who has demonstrated herself as a mature and extraordinary researcher of Russian folk music. The fundamental nature of the research, the radical novelty of the methodology and the credibility of the scholarly results have provided this work with a groundbreaking character. It has become a reference study for music scholars, who have pursued structural and typological methods of research for many years, and has maintained this status to the present day. The book includes a compilation of almost 180 examples of vocal lamentations from the Vologda region pertaining to funerals, recruitments and weddings (solo cries of the brides and cries sung by choral ensembles of girls). At the core of the monograph lies a detailed study of this phenomenon. Its goal is to present the local tradition of vocal lamentations as a holistic phenomenon endowed with a systematic organization. The structural-typological method has been chosen as the main research tool; its chief theorist and proponent in Soviet ethnomusicology of the second half of the 20th century was Eugeny Gippius, who had everted an immense influence on the formation of Efimenkova as a musicologist. In Severnorusskaya prichet' [Northern Russian Lamentations] Gippius’s ideas of structural-systematic approach to the study of folk music have found its practical manifestation for the first time. A significant role in the study of the East Vologda region is assigned to the arealogical method. As the result of this, six published geographical maps have provided the first example of geographical mapping of Russian folk vocal lamentations.

A New Predictive Algorithm for Time Series Forecasting Based on Machine Learning Techniques: Evidence for Decision Making in Agriculture and Tourism Sectors

Accurate time series prediction techniques are becoming fundamental to modern decision support systems. As massive data processing develops in its practicality, machine learning (ML) techniques applied to time series can automate and improve prediction models. The radical novelty of this paper is the development of a hybrid model that combines a new approach to the classical Kalman filter with machine learning techniques, i.e., support vector regression (SVR) and nonlinear autoregressive (NAR) neural networks, to improve the performance of existing predictive models. The proposed hybrid model uses, on the one hand, an improved Kalman filter method that eliminates the convergence problems of time series data with large error variance and, on the other hand, an ML algorithm as a correction factor to predict the model error. The results reveal that our hybrid models obtain accurate predictions, substantially reducing the root mean square and absolute mean errors compared to the classical and alternative Kalman filter models and achieving a goodness of fit greater than 0.95. Furthermore, the generalization of this algorithm was confirmed by its validation in two different scenarios.

Legitimation through Optimal Distinctiveness: Evidence from Emerging Technology-based Start-ups

How can emerging technology-based start-ups attain legitimacy from external stakeholders? This question is critical as emerging technology-based start-ups face dual liabilities of newness arising from both a short history and the radical novelty of emerging technologies themselves. Drawing on optimal distinctiveness perspective, we propose that emerging technology-based start-ups can obtain legitimacy through optimal business proximity to their counterparts. We further construct a multi-level contingency framework at venture (i.e. venture age), third-party (i.e. media attention), and country (i.e. information and communication technology (ICT) development) levels. With a sample of 3670 blockchain start-ups, we discover an inverted U-shaped influence of business proximity on legitimacy attainment of emerging technology-based start-ups. We also reveal that venture age, media attention and country-level ICT development will attenuate the inverted U-shaped relationship. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on legitimation of emerging technology-based start-ups by extending optimal distinctiveness perspective.

Brand New or More of the Same Nuclear? (De)Constructing the Economic Promise of the European Pressurised Reactor in France and the UK

ABSTRACT Technological innovation needs construction of promises and expectations to mobilise resources and supportive networks, yet exaggerated promises risk leading to disappointment and undermining this very support. Drawing on an analysis of secondary literature and press articles, the concepts of hype cycle and Regimes of Economics of Techno-scientific Promises (ETP) are applied to examine the construction of the largely failed promise of the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), designed to spearhead a French-led ‘nuclear renaissance’ in the 1990s. The debates on the EPR economics in France and the UK illustrate the country-specific features that condition the ability of an incremental in-between innovation, in an archetypically ‘modernist’ field of technology, to survive in today’s ‘presentist’ era of shrinking timeframes. The phase of disillusionment depicted in the hype cycle can better be described as two country-specific processes whereby the initial promise was continuously modified and requalified in order to maintain its legitimacy and credibility. As an incremental innovation, the EPR continues to struggle between the contrasting needs of demonstrating radical novelty and experience-based continuity. This tension is accentuated by the country-specific legacies and imaginaries, including the historically shaped ideological trust in the state and the market.

Emergence and Artificial Intelligence in the Performing Arts

Starting from a brief analysis of the validity and applicability as a cognitive tool of the concept of emergency in the examination of the theatrical phenomenon, we evaluate the aspects related to the radical novelty that emergence implies as a phenomenon of systemic self-organization. Thus, taking into account both the ostensible nature of theatrical process and emergency and their ambiguous nature, any theatre performance can be considered as characterized by emergency. At the same time, the unpredictability of emergence makes it difficult to establish which of the current trends of theatrical manifestation will be validated by the appearance of theatrical novelty. Obviously, the impact that information technology has in the field of performing arts seems to imply that novelty might come from this dimension of theatrical activity. However, even if we can note performances played by actroids or performances whose texts are created by robots, we should treat carefully the idea that emergence might occur from this direction. In fact, there is a similarity in reception between, for example, animation theatre and performances based on actroids. We can also notice a similarity between a text created with the means of artificial intelligence and the collage technique. That is why we ask ourselves if what Martin Scorsese observed, namely that some films that benefit from a substantial contribution of the film trick made with the help of computer technology can no longer be included in the concept of cinematography, does not have the same kind of impact in the performing arts. Thus, the emergence, in the performing arts, does not necessarily lead to the renewal of the system, but can also lead to the appearance of a parallel system, different from the existing one. It remains to be seen to what extent a performance can still be defined as a theatre performance when the spectator becomes a robot.

ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ПРОДАЖУ ІННОВАЦІЙНИХ ПРОДУКТІВ ХАРЧУВАННЯ

The article studies peculiarities of innovative food products sale. It is estimated that every year tens of thousands of new consumer goods are introduced into production in the world. However, the current over-competitive market leaves only a small share of these products. The emergence of a new product is often associated with innovation. It is noted that any innovative product must be critically analyzed, because not every new change leads to development. The economic essence of an innovative product and an innovative food product in particular is revealed. It defines product as such which was developed with the help of technological innovations application, which is characterized by the presence of new, different from the traditional consumer properties of food, when the degree of those properties expression is characterized by radical novelty, improvement, modification. It is manifested in the change of qualitative features of food, production technology, recipe composition, functional purpose, and packaging. Peculiarities of marketing the innovation in the innovative goods market and possible problems that may arise when selling an innovative product are identified. It is noted that the innovative product promotion is made up of a set of measures aimed at stimulating consumer demand and maintaining a favorable attitude to the company, providing information about the innovation benefits to potential consumers and stimulating their desire to acquire innovation through information products, promotions, and sales promotion tools. It is proved that the peculiarities of innovative food products sale are associated with the consumer demand activation and maintaining a favorable attitude towards the enterprise. Meanwhile promotion allows solving the following tasks: informing consumers about the ECONOMICS AND MANAGEMENT OF ENTERPRISES Issue II (82), 2021 29 innovative product and its properties; forming the innovative food product image; changing stereotypes of product perception; stimulating participants in the sales system. It is proposed to consider the organization of innovative food products selling process as a combination of elements of the enterprise sales, pricing and communication policies.

The Culture-Centred Paradigm in Contemporary Art

This article aims to explain the general features of contemporary art and its radical novelty. While recognising the importance of postmodernism as a marker of the boundary of cultural epochs, the author argues that it is impossible either to reduce the features of contemporary art to postmodernism or to explain them through the foundations of postmodernism. In its own way, postmodernism sums up the great past of the history of humankind. Contemporary art expresses the trends of its development and movement towards the future of human civilization. Several examples illustrate the novel essence of contemporary art – its appeal to the representation and mastery of diverse cultural phenomena as an independent and self-sufficient specific reality. The universality and growing scale of contemporary art that concentrates on cultural phenomena make it necessary to link its emergence and characteristics to the radical socio-cultural evolution (peaceful revolution) of our era. The essence and scale of this unfolding process lie in the qualitative growth of productive nature-transforming and socio-organising, material, informational, and spiritual abilities of culture both as a specific and universal way of existence and development for human societies and individuals and as a particular world (“supra-natural”). The scale of the power and impact of culture on the life of modern humanity and each person and the visible prospects of its future progress are such that they are capable of transforming culture from “second nature” (its traditional definition) into first nature – the main determining principle of the life of humankind. This objective process defines a qualitative change of the entire cultural consciousness, first and foremost the subsystem most sensitive to novelty and responsive to radical alterations of cultural life, i. e. artistic consciousness. This is expressed by the birth, establishment, and evolution of a new culture-centred paradigm of cultural consciousness alongside the one which has existed for millennia, programmed to represent nature and human life (nature-centred).

New algorithms for automatic modelling and forecasting of decision support systems

Decision support systems often rely on time series forecasting, making the accuracy of such systems of paramount importance for their efficiency. Since most systems nowadays require the processing of massive amount of data, automatic identification of time series models has become inevitable. This automatism is inherent in artificial intelligence methods, but it often goes unnoticed that forecasting ‘classical’ methods have also been developing their own automatic methods for a long time. The radical novelty of this paper is the development of a brand new algorithm for identification of structural Unobserved Components models from which decision support systems may benefit. A second point is that combination of forecasts is more fruitful than competition or method selection in some cases. Both points are illustrated in two examples that show the effectiveness of the identification procedure and the forecasting gains when fairly different methods are combined.

Domesticating the future through history

In the most general sense, the modern idea of history is a conceptual tool deployed in order to domesticate experienced novelty and expectations of the future. In Western modernity, the operation we usually call historicization has been nothing other than an operation of temporal domestication: the integration of experienced and expected novelty into a larger processual scheme we associate with modern historical time. Based on these theoretical considerations, this article has a dual objective. First, through an analysis of historical approaches to the Anthropocene—that exemplifies present-day perceived radical novelty—it attempts to identify the linguistic-conceptual means of temporal domestication through historical time. Second, it raises the question of the politics of historical time today by focusing on the evaluative aspects of temporal domestication in an age when the future increasingly appears a threat. As a brief conclusion, the article calls for broader recognition of what it calls a plurihistoricity of “historical” transitions, the co-existence of multiple kinds of transformation and change over time.

A deep learning framework to early identify emerging technologies in large-scale outlier patents: an empirical study of CNC machine tool

Radical novelty is one of the key characteristics of emerging technologies. This characteristics makes emerging technologies as a quite different from established technologies. From the perspective of radical novelty, some studies consider patents with little similarity in terms of key concepts and contents to existing patents as candidate emerging technologies. However, existing research remains in examining small-scale patents for evaluating candidate emerging technologies due to the lack of data-processing capacity—the recent rising of deep learning methods may help in this. This study, therefore, develops a novel deep learning based framework for identifying emerging technologies by combining a technological impact evaluation using patents and a social impact evaluation using website articles. Using a large scale multi-source dataset including 129,694 patents and 35,940 website articles, this paper applies the framework to investigate the case of computerized numerical control machine tool technology, through which the framework is validated. The results show that 16,131 patents out of 129,694 patents are considered as candidate emerging technologies, and 192 patents out of 16,131 patents are identified as emerging technologies through the evaluation of technology impact and social impact. This implies that these candidate emerging technologies can evolve to emerging technologies, though not all of them—we need deep learning method to scrutinize a larger scale multi-source data to identify rather a small number of potential emerging technologies. The proposed framework can also be extended to explore other disciplinary multi-source data for strategic decision support in identifying emerging technologies.

History’s Time

The article maintains that the so-called temporal turn that has recently taken hold in the theory of history expands the subject matter of academic historiography (allow- ing it to include the previously little-studied ways of experiencing and ordering time during the eras that preceded the institutionalization of historical knowledge and the formation of classical historicism’s linear temporality), while also eliciting questions about its practical purpose and “the use and abuse of history in life.” The author sug- gests using Michel de Certeau’s idea from the 1980s of repoliticizing historiography as a way to gain insight into this topic. The author finds that repoliticization adopted as a research strategy can be deployed in two modes: a) as a critique of professional historiography’s ambition to obtain maximally objective knowledge about a past which is considered fundamen- tally different from the present and incompatible with it; and b) as a special practice- oriented philosophy of history, which is to be called “radical historicism.” In the first use of repoliticization, the criticism is along the lines of studying the “practical past” as Hayden White advocated in his book of that title, the last one to be published before his death. In it he exposed the antagonism between the historical past that is created by professional historians and the practical past that is available to any- one without exception. The author proposes his own approach to the concept of rad- ical historicism, inspired by Mark Bevir’s writings as well as by the ideas of a number of famous Marxist thinkers and theorists of radical democracy. Generally speaking, radical historicism holds to a contingent ontology of the historical event (its radical novelty) and a rejection of the present state of affairs (in which the historian lives) as a “natural” or “legitimate” configuration of historical forces and processes.

The COVID-19 Pandemic qua Artefact

In this article I argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is an unintended artefact with emergent features. Not only is the pandemic an accidental consequence of human agency, it also a) emerges from but is not reducible to its basal features, and b) possesses the features of radical novelty, coherence, wholeness, dynamism, ostensiveness, and downwards causation.

Multidimensional Scientometric indicators for the detection of emerging research topics

The detection of emerging research topics (ERTs) is an important step in the promotion of potentially promising research. In this paper, we first distinguish the concept of ERT from that of common-related topics. We discuss multi-dimensional and practical bibliometric indicators to discover high-impact ERTs at a fine level of granularity. To this end, we focus on three objectives. First, we determine a method for identifying research topics from scholarly publications. Second, we developed a method for uncovering ERTs. Third, we conduct an experimental analysis to demonstrate the operationalization of our method. High-impact ERTs are selected based on the advice of field experts. Then, we divide the identified ERTs into seven patterns and propose different research and development (R&D) strategies for each topic. In general, previous studies have mainly focused on the attributes of “novelty” and “growth.” Compared with extant ERT identification analysis, this study pays more attention to the future economic and social impact of ERTs and the reduction of uncertainty. This article is the first attempt to devise an ERT detection framework by comprehensively measuring its five characteristics (radical novelty, relatively fast growth, persistence and coherence, potential high impact, and uncertainty and ambiguity reduction) and proposing feasible operational indicators and processes. Thus, different R&D layout strategies for different economic and social-impact topics are outlined herein, which contribute significantly to the development of science and technology policies. The evidence presented suggests that our methodology can be used by decision makers to evaluate emerging scientific research.

Sleeping away the Factory, Healing with Time: Gaston Bachelard, the Poetic Imagination and Testről és lélekről/ On Body and Soul (2017)

Gaston Bachelard distinguishes the radical novelty and newness of the imagination from pre-existing sensory impressions (memory, perception). In this article, I explore Bachelard's connections between time, the imagined image and poetic form, and I consider their implications for the cinema. Concentrating my analysis on Ildikó Enyedi's Testről és lélekről/ On Body and Soul (2017) — a film that alternates between doubled worlds, depictions of human and animal life — I draw out the temporality and the diversity of Bachelard's imagined images. Bringing Bachelard's instant, vertical time and the crystalline to bear on Enyedi's film, I argue that, under the pretext of sleep, rest and dreaming, On Body and Soul engages the temporality and attentiveness of the Bachelardian imagination, together with its poetic effects.

A topic models based framework for detecting and forecasting emerging technologies

The identification of emerging technologies can bring valuable intelligence to enterprises and countries determining research and development (R&D) priorities. Emerging technologies are closely related to emerging topics in terms of several well-documented attributes: relatively fast growth, radical novelty and prominent impact. Our previous work on detecting and forecasting emerging topics is adapted to measure technology emergence, but the dynamic influence model (DIM) is replaced by the topical n-grams (TNG) model in this framework to nominate several emerging technologies in technical terms and to exploit the potential of topic models. Hence, technologies are viewed as term-based themes in this study. Three indicators are designed to reflect the above attributes: the fast growth indicator, the radical novelty indicator and the prominent impact indicator. The relatively fast growth indicator is calculated from the results of the TNG model and the radical novelty indicator comes from the citation influence model (CIM). As for the prominent impact indicator, the involving authors are used after name disambiguation and credit allocation. The following fields are utilized to develop the models: title, abstract, keywords-author, publication year, byline information, and cited references. We participated in the 2018–2019 Measuring Tech Emergence Contest with the proposed method, and 8 out of 10 submitted ones met the contest organizer’s criteria of technology emergence. Criteria included the percentage of high growth terms out of total terms provided, the degree of growth of the terms, and the frequency of those high growth terms across the dataset. Then, a qualitative assessment of overall methodology was conducted by three judges. In the end, we won Second Prize in the contest.

Buyer–supplier collaboration during emerging technology development

The purpose of this paper is to understand how buyers-suppliers collaborate during the development of emerging technologies. Using the relational view, the paper examines a high technology aerospace firm as it develops additive manufacturing technology with two suppliers. It is found that the radical novelty and high degree of technological uncertainty associated with emerging technologies lead to a small pool of capable suppliers, limited machine capacity and constrained raw material supply. Companies, therefore, turn to University Technology Centres (UTCs) to incubate new ideas and test prototypes before involving suppliers in development efforts. Companies also seek out government-funded catapult centres where buyers, suppliers and customers are co-located in a single facility, allowing them to interact and share knowledge on a regular basis. The study contributes to the relational view by identifying that regular interaction within collaborative relationships does not necessarily lead to knowledge spill-overs between buyers and suppliers during the development of emerging technologies. Instead, the study finds that knowledge exchange is facilitated when suppliers have the freedom to use intellectual property in non-competing industries and have guarantees of future business that allow them to invest in machine capacity and raw material supply.