Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

This has long-term consequences for innovation. Research shows that breakthrough inventions are more likely to come from individual inventors or smaller teams – one group of Ph.D. researchers analysed 65 million papers, patents and software products from 1954 to 2014, and found that ‘while large teams do indeed advance and develop science, small teams are critical for disrupting it’.43 And while, as we’ve seen, a few companies take a very ambitious approach to research – Google springs to mind – the data suggests that those corporate giants can also come to narrow the focus of research in fields where they dominate. Researchers who analysed 110,000 papers in the broad field of AI concluded that much of the research conducted by companies tended to be very narrow compared to academic research. Commercial research, which seemed to be laser-focused on approaches which had already been shown to be successful, tended to reduce the number of pathways being explored.