The underlying social dynamics of paradigm shifts

We develop here a multi-agent model of the creation of knowledge (scientific progress or technological evolution) within a community of researchers devoted to such endeavors. In the proposed model, agents learn in a physical-technological landscape, and weight is attached to both individual search and social influence. We find that the combination of these two forces together with random experimentation can account for both i) marginal change, that is, periods of normal science or refinements on the performance of a given technology (and in which the community stays in the neighborhood of the current paradigm); and ii) radical change, which takes the form of scientific paradigm shifts (or discontinuities in the structure of performance of a technology) that is observed as a swift migration of the knowledge community towards the new and superior paradigm. The efficiency of the search process is heavily dependent on the weight that agents posit on social influence. The occurrence of a paradigm shift becomes more likely when each member of the community attaches a small but positive weight to the experience of his/her peers. For this parameter region, nevertheless, a conservative force is exerted by the representatives of the current paradigm. However, social influence is not strong enough to seriously hamper individual discovery, and can act so as to empower successful individual pioneers who have conquered the new and superior paradigm.Fil: Rodriguez Sickert, Carlos. Universidad del Desarrollo; ChileFil: Cosmelli, Diego. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; ChileFil: Claro, Francisco. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; ChileFil: Fuentes, Miguel Angel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad San Sebastián; Chil

Infrastructure transitions toward sustainability: a complex adaptive systems perspective

To ensure infrastructure assets are procured and maintained by government on behalf of citizens, appropriate policy and institutional architecture is needed, particularly if a fundamental shift to more sustainable infrastructure is the goal. The shift in recent years from competitive and resource-intensive procurement to more collaborative and sustainable approaches to infrastructure governance is considered a major transition in infrastructure procurement systems. In order to better understand this transition in infrastructure procurement arrangements, the concept of emergence from Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory is offered as a key construct. Emergence holds that micro interactions can result in emergent macro order. Applying the concept of emergence to infrastructure procurement, this research examines how interaction of agents in individual projects can result in different industry structural characteristics. The paper concludes that CAS theory, and particularly the concept of ‘emergence’, provides a useful construct to understand infrastructure procurement dynamics and progress towards sustainability

Oil scenarios for long-term business planning: Royal Dutch Shell and generative explanation, 1960-2010

Most executives know that overarching paints of plausible futures will profoundly affect the competitiveness and survival of their organisation. Initially from the perspective of Shell, this article discuses oil scenarios and their relevance for upstream investments. Scenarios are then incorporated into generative explanation and its principal instrument, namely agent-based computational laboratories, as the new standard of explanation of the past and the present and the new way to structure the uncertainties of the future. The key concept is that the future should not be regarded as ‘complicated’ but as ‘complex’, in that there are uncertainties about the driving forces that generate unanticipated futures, which cannot be explored analytically.oil scenarios; Shell; ACEGES; agent-based computational economics

Multi-project scheduling with 2-stage decomposition

A non-preemptive, zero time lag multi-project scheduling problem with multiple modes and limited renewable and nonrenewable resources is considered. A 2-stage decomposition approach is adopted to formulate the problem as a hierarchy of 0-1 mathematical programming models. At stage one, each project is reduced to a macro-activity with macro-modes resulting in a single project network where the objective is the maximization of the net present value and the cash flows are positive. For setting the time horizon three different methods are developed and tested. A genetic algorithm approach is designed for this problem, which is also employed to generate a starting solution for the exact solution procedure. Using the starting times and the resource profiles obtained in stage one each project is scheduled at stage two for minimum makespan. The result of the first stage is subjected to a post-processing procedure to distribute the remaining resource capacities. Three new test problem sets are generated with 81, 84 and 27 problems each and three different configurations of solution procedures are tested

Models in evolutionary economics and environmental policy: Towards an evolutionary environmental economics

In this paper we review evolutionary economic modelling in relation to environmental policy. We discuss three areas in which evolutionary economic models have a particularly high added value for environmental policy-making: the double externality problem, technological transitions and consumer demand. We explore the possibilities to apply evolutionary economic models in environmental policy assessment, including the opportunities for making policy-making endogenous to environmental innovation. We end with a critical discussion of the challenges that remain.

The strategic and the stratigraphic: a working paper on the dynamics of organisational evolution.

Despite large debates over fundamental issues a broadly evolutionary paradigm of organisations is growing in legitimacy. It may though be preferable to replace the metaphor of the organisation as an organism with the literal assertion that both social organisations are ecologies (Weeks and Galunic, 2003). They are still classes of complex systems maintained, and specified by, replicators (or schemata Gell Mann 1994) but the interactor is not necessarily the individual organisation, or population of organisations. Conceptual evolution has been argued as a post-Kuhnian analysis of the scientific process (Hull 1988), a rival economic paradigm (references in Hodgson 1993), a view of strategy (e.g. Lloyd 1990) and an explanation of organisational transformation and learning (Price and Evans 1993, Price 1994, 1995).My concern in this paper is to compare strategic extinction and speciation events in both systems. The stratigraphic record shows a dominant pattern of extinctions and radiative speciations which then settle to stabilised ecosystems. The historical and commercial (or strategigraphic?) record illustrates a similar pattern (Rothschild 1990, Tylecote 1993, Arthur 1994). The causes of extinction events may be genuinely external to the system affected (e.g. asteroid impacts interrupting a reptilian dominated system cannot plausibly be traced to feedback processes in any coupled eco/ lithosphere) or they may be internal when the success of a particular replicator system disturbs a wider systemic balance (e.g. ice-house glaciations terminating plant dominated episodes of earth history). Strategic scale parallels of both forms of extinction event can be seen in commercial and technological history. Keywords Organisational evolution, Punctuated equilibrium, Narrative ecology, memetics

Accelerating Scientific Discovery by Formulating Grand Scientific Challenges

One important question for science and society is how to best promote scientific progress. Inspired by the great success of Hilbert's famous set of problems, the FuturICT project tries to stimulate and focus the efforts of many scientists by formulating Grand Challenges, i.e. a set of fundamental, relevant and hardly solvable scientific questions.Comment: To appear in EPJ Special Topics. For related work see http://www.futurict.eu and http://www.soms.ethz.c