Balancing innovation and assimilation in research communities

It has been statistically observed that the speed at which a corpus of knowledge advances does not scale linearly with quantities like the number of active researchers or number of research papers published in a given field.

Furthermore, as a body of knowledge grows, individual researchers must somehow strike the right balance between generating new knowledge through innovation and assimilating knowledge generated by others.

Here, we propose and analyse a pair of interacting particle system models representing some stylised features of the advancement of knowledge in a research community, captured as a stochastic travelling wave in knowledge space.

Both particle systems exhibit a diminishing return in the knowledge advancement speed as research communities grow larger, and suggest that researchers should spend more time on assimilation of knowledge than innovation as their research community grows.