Designing Diversity for Sustained Innovation

The wisdom of crowds hinges on the independence and diversity of their members’ information and approach. UChicago Max Palevsky Professor of Sociology James Evans will explore how the wisdom of scientific, technological, business, and civic crowds for sustained discovery, invention, and cooperation operate through a process of collective abduction wherein unexpected findings or conflicts stimulate innovators to forge new insights to make the surprising unsurprising. Drawing on tens of millions of research papers and patents across the life sciences, physical sciences and inventions, as also interactions between diverse collaborating groups, Professor Evans shows that surprising designs and discoveries are the best predictors of outsized success and that surprising advances systematically emerge across, rather than within researchers or teams; most commonly when innovators from one field surprisingly publish or share problem-solving results to an audience in a distant and diverse order. This shows how across innovators, teams and fields, connection and conformity are associated with reduced replication and impeded innovation. Using these principles, Professor Evans simulates processes of knowledge search to demonstrate the relationship between crowded fields and constrained collective inferences, and he illustrates how inverting the traditional approach to artificial intelligence approach, to avoid rather than mimic human search, enables the design of diversity that systematically violates established field boundaries and is associated with the marked success of predicted innovations. He will conclude with a discussion of prospects and challenges in a connected age for sustainable innovation through the design and preservation of differences in science and society.

Speaker

James Evans

Max Palevsky Professor of Sociology

Director of Knowledge Lab

Faculty Director of Masters Program in Computational Social Science

The University of Chicago

External Professor of Santa Fe Institute

In-person Event

February 7, 2023 (Tuesday) on campus       

6:30 pm Guest Presentation

7:30 pm Q & A

8:00 pm Event Ends