Models of innovation: Why models of innovation are models, or what work is being done in calling them models?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Models abound in the literature on innovation. They are continuously being invented and succeed one after the other. At the same time, these models are regularly criticized. This article looks at models of innovation and conducts a conceptual analysis of models. To the producers and users of models of innovation, a model has at least five different meanings: conceptualization, narrative, figure, tool, and perspective. This article suggests that the term ‘model’ has both a scientific and a rhetorical function. A ‘model’ is a symbol of scientificity and travels easily between scholars and between the latter and policy-makers. Calling a conceptualization or narrative or tool ‘model’ facilitates its propagation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.054 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".