EAGER: Innovation and Growth of Human Social Organizations from Cities to Corporations

本研究考察了促进创新和经济增长的社会、组织和基础设施因素。它有三个主要目标。 第一个是使用来自世界各地城市系统和企业的数据集和跨时间尺度建立创新，经济增长和社会组织规模的指标。 第二是通过对城市和企业的深入研究，特别是对波音商用飞机部门的时间演变进行研究，建立创新和增长动态之间的定量联系。第三是发现和数学模型的微观尺度的过程和网络结构，导致经济生产力和创新的规模，包括那些导致规模经济和学习的生产和增加创新的回报，与波音商用飞机部门的组成部分的过程中的具体研究。该项目借鉴了各种学科，并与工业界密切合作。社会科学的概念和假设将通过应用于城市和公司的大型综合数据库的物理学和统计理论的分析技术进行测试。该研究是基于一个全面的，数据驱动的，对社会组织中的创新和发现过程进行定量研究，有可能对影响创新速度的一般因素产生变革性的新见解和增长本项目以实证数据分析为基础，通过对一家大型企业的深入案例研究，在微观层面上发展和检验经济增长理论。对波音公司的历史和发展及其创新过程的关注，特别是对技术和组织突破、老化和规模化以及学习曲线的关注，由于可以获得详细的公司数据，因此特别不寻常。更广泛的影响：尽管这项研究本身就有风险，但它提供了开发适用于各种规模的社会组织增长预测理论的潜力。 因此，它可以为组织理论、经济学、社会科学和复杂系统的概念基础提供新的见解。反过来，这将对公共和私营部门的培训、教育和研发方案产生重大影响。

This research examines the social, organizational and infrastructural factors that promote innovation and lead to economic growth. It has three main goals. The first is to establish metrics of innovation, economic growth and size of social organizations across scales using datasets from urban systems and corporations around the world and across times scales. The second is to establish the quantitative connection between the dynamics of innovation and growth, through in-depth studies of cities and firms, with a specific study of the temporal evolution of Boeing's Commercial Aircraft Division. The third is to discover and model mathematically the micro-scale processes and network structures resulting in scaling of economic productivity and innovation, including those leading to economies of scale and learning in production and increasing returns in innovation, with a specific study of the component processes within Boeing Commercial Aircraft Division. The project draws on a variety of academic disciplines and features a close collaboration with industry. Concepts and hypotheses from the social sciences will be tested via analytical techniques from physics and statistical theory applied to large and comprehensive databases of cities and firms.Intellectual merit: The research is based on a comprehensive, data-driven, quantitative study of innovation and discovery processes in social organizations that has the potential to generate transformative new insights on the general factors that affect the rate of innovation and growth. This project develops and tests theories of economic growth at the micro scale, relying on empirical data analysis, and in-depth case studies of a major corporation. The focus on the history and growth of Boeing and its processes of innovation, particularly on its technological and organizational breakthroughs, aging and scaling, and learning curves, is particularly unusual because of the access to detailed firm data.Broader Impacts: Although this research is inherently risky, it offers the potential to develop a predictive theory of the growth of social organizations applicable across scales. As such, it could provide new insights into the conceptual basis for organizational theory, economics, social sciences and complex systems. This, in turn, would have a substantial impact on training, education and R&D programs in the public and private sector.