16 April 2013
Post date: Apr 17, 2013 10:33:48 AM
Chris Hughes talked about his plans for a model of internet governance and how it relates to innovation in the technological sphere. The idea is to simulate a group of companies whose strategies can vary between wholly innovative practice (investing in R&D to develop new products) and wholly derivative practice (copying the products of others). The idea is to let these different strategies fight it out for profits and market share, and then to systematically vary the regulatory regime they work under (e.g., how aggressively is copyright law policed?) to see which set of regulations tends to maximize innovation overall.
Relevant links from the discussion include:
(a) Wintersim paper on general purpose technologies (nano-technology in this case) and innovation:
http://informs-sim.org/wsc12papers/includes/files/inv283.pdf
(b) Paul Ormerod's CS4 talk discussing social imitation as the driving force in a lot of newer markets/products (e.g., YouTube views, catwalk-model-usage):
http://cs4southampton.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/cs4-future-talk-paul-ormerod/
The video isn't yet up but the interview is:
http://cs4southampton.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/cs4-interview-paul-ormerod/
His talk was very similar to this presentation from his Web site:
http://www.paulormerod.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Evolutionary-Models-of-Choice.pdf
(c) I think the Nigel Gilbert stuff that we mentioned before is this one (with freely available NetLogo code), which has a full history of related papers:
The original 2001 paper is here: