Innovation Slowdown: Decelerating Concept Creation and Declining Originality in New Technological Concepts

The creation of new technological concepts through design reuses, recombination, and synthesis of prior concepts to create new ones may lead to exponential growth of the concept space over time. However, our statistical analysis of a large-scale technology semantic network consisting of over four million concepts from patent texts found evidence of a persistent deceleration in the pace of concept creation and a decline in the originality of newly created concepts. These trends may be attributed to the limitations of human intelligence in innovating beyond an expanding space of prior art. To sustain innovation, we recommend the development and implementation of creative artificial intelligence that can augment various aspects of the innovation process, including learning, creation, and evaluation.