Towards quantification of the role of materials innovation in overall technological development
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Magee_Towards Quantification.pdf
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758.26 KB
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Author(s)
Magee, Christopher L.
Date Issued
June 2012
Journal
Complexity
Publisher
Wiley-Blackwell Publishers
Citation
Magee, Christopher L. “Towards quantification of the role of materials innovation in overall technological development.” Complexity 18, no. 1 (September 25, 2012): 10-25.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
This article presents a method for quantitatively assessing the role of materials innovation in overall technological development. The method involves classifying the technical changes underlying the overall innovation process first within a set of functional categories and then within each category as a hierarchical array of technical changes. It is specifically found that about 2/3 of the total progress in computation over the past 40 years has been due to materials/process innovations. More speculatively, materials/process innovation contributes at least 20% of the progress in all areas and the relative contribution of materials/process innovation to overall technological progress has grown in the past few decades.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1002/cplx.20309