Subjective Perspectives within Learned Representations Predict High-Impact Innovation

TL;DR

This study uses machine learning to model subjective perspectives of creators across various domains, showing that perspective diversity predicts high-impact innovation and can inform team formation and policy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to quantify subjective perspectives within learned language representations and demonstrates their predictive power for creative success.

Findings

Perspective diversity predicts creative achievement.

Background diversity can hinder innovation.

AI simulations support observational results.

Abstract

Existing studies of innovation emphasize the power of social structures to shape innovation capacity. Emerging machine learning approaches, however, enable us to model innovators' personal perspectives and interpersonal innovation opportunities as a function of their prior experience. We theorize and then quantify subjective perspectives and their interaction based on innovator positions within the geometric space of concepts inscribed by dynamic machine-learned language representations. Using data on millions of scientists, inventors, screenplay writers, entrepreneurs, and Wikipedia contributors across their respective creative domains, here we show that measured subjective perspectives predict which ideas individuals and groups will creatively attend to and successfully combine in the future. Across all cases and time periods we examine, when perspective diversity is decomposed as the difference between collaborators' perspectives on their creation, and background diversity as the difference between their experiences, the former consistently anticipates creative achievement while the latter portends its opposite. We analyze a natural experiment and simulate creative collaborations between AI agents designed with various perspective and background diversity, which support our observational findings. We explore mechanisms underlying these findings and identify how successful collaborators leverage common language to weave together diverse experiences obtained through trajectories of prior work. These perspectives converge and provoke one another to innovate. We examine the significance of these findings for team formation and research policy.