As with any metric, it comes down to what you’re looking to diagnose—and whether averages across the total system are a useful measure for determining overall health. If someone had a single atrophied leg and really buff arms, the average would tell you they have above-average muscle strength, but that’s obviously not the whole story.
Same goes for innovation: if idea production is booming in a single area and dead everywhere else, it might look like the net knowledge production ecosystem is healthy when it is not. And that’s the problem here, especially when you factor in that new idea production is accelerated by cross-pollination between fields. By taking the average, we miss out on determining which areas of knowledge production need nurturing, which are ripe for cross-pollination, and which are at risk of being tapped out in the near future. And so any diagnostic metric we hope to create to more effectively manage knowledge ecosystems has to be able to take this into account.
The most exciting prospect here, imo, is building capacity to identify underresearched and underinvested foundational knowledge areas, filling those gaps, and then building scaffolding between them so they can cross-pollinate. And doing this recursively, so we can accelerate the pace of knowledge production and translation.
As with any metric, it comes down to what you’re looking to diagnose—and whether averages across the total system are a useful measure for determining overall health. If someone had a single atrophied leg and really buff arms, the average would tell you they have above-average muscle strength, but that’s obviously not the whole story.
Same goes for innovation: if idea production is booming in a single area and dead everywhere else, it might look like the net knowledge production ecosystem is healthy when it is not. And that’s the problem here, especially when you factor in that new idea production is accelerated by cross-pollination between fields. By taking the average, we miss out on determining which areas of knowledge production need nurturing, which are ripe for cross-pollination, and which are at risk of being tapped out in the near future. And so any diagnostic metric we hope to create to more effectively manage knowledge ecosystems has to be able to take this into account.
I agree that if you want to understand where there might be problems/opportunities, you can’t just look at averages.
The most exciting prospect here, imo, is building capacity to identify underresearched and underinvested foundational knowledge areas, filling those gaps, and then building scaffolding between them so they can cross-pollinate. And doing this recursively, so we can accelerate the pace of knowledge production and translation.