The Distinctiveness of Individuals: Using Knowledge Structures To Represent Research Focuses; The Field of Stem Cell Research

A fundamental challenge for economics and the social sciences is the development of models of creativity and innovative activity, spurring innovation and cultural development, across all fields. Originality is rooted in distinctiveness: an individual comes to make original, even unique contributions because in some way he or she is different from others and has different experiences, thus is able to create or invent something or some concept that others cannot create or invent. To trace the creative, inventive process in these terms means, as I take it, representing the distinctiveness of individuals’ creative interests and research focuses, as well as the distinctive paths of development they follow – experiences they have, phenomena they encounter and observe, events they witness, and elements they encounter, including through reading books and articles, conversations, and attending social and cultural events – through which they come to make their original contributions. In turn, developing such representations requires moving beyond models in which all individuals are essentially interchangeable, with very similar profiles differing only in a few parameters, an approach common to both neoclassical and behavioral economic models – for in such models it is not possible to represent, at least not in a deeper more realistic way, the ways in which individuals differ from one another that lead them to make distinct, unique creative contributions. In this brief article I outline a methodology for addressing this challenge. I describe development of a methodology describing the research focuses of interest of a set of individuals working in a field of creative endeavor, which could be a scientific or engineering field, a business sector, for example financial engineering or product development in a particular industry, or a field of art or design. The approach I describe is based on building a knowledge structure representing the field, specifically the set of conceptual and practical elements in the field, and representing the focuses of interest and research activities of individuals and work groups in terms of the knowledge structure. This representation can then be used to study the differences in focuses among individuals working in the field, and the specific elements and combinations of elements that make each individual’s or work group’s focus distinctive. In The Nature of Creative Development [1] I describe creative development: I show that individuals creative interests are at the heart of their creative development and work, and describe a set of specific pathways through which individuals, through pursuing and developing their interests creatively, generate ideas, insights, and creative projects, leading to creative contributions and innovations. The methodology I describe here weds the model of creative development in my book with a framework for knowledge representation as developed and described in computer science, artificial intelligence, and the representation of conceptual structures, as for example presented by Sowa [2,3]. The methodology I present shows a way leading on to the development of models describing individuals’ rich conceptual worlds and the ways their rich conceptual worlds are the basis for their creative and professional activities and contributions. Such modeling is fundamentally at odds with the extreme simplification of the human conceptual world that is common to nearly all modeling at present in the social and behavioral sciences. Standard modeling approaches do not represent the richness of individuals’ conceptual worlds sufficiently to manifest the ways in which each individual’s conceptual world is distinctive – which is the essential basis for creativity and innovation. I mention as an application ongoing work developing a representation of research focuses of researchers working in the field of human embryonic stem cell (HESC) biology. For this work we are developing a knowledge structure of the field of HESC biology; we follow the general approach developed by the Gene Ontology Consortium for mapping the knowledge structure in cellular and molecular biology [4,5].