Cities as Innovation Hubs

Saturday, 14 February 2015: 8:30 AM-11:30 AM
Room LL21B (San Jose Convention Center)
Luis M. Bettencourt, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM
This paper discusses cities as innovation hubs, emphasizing the interplay between information flows, structural features and scaling in determining the patterns of innovation across a number of different urban environments. It introduces a modeling framework based on properties of complex systems and takes advantage of the growing availability of empirical data worldwide to develop quantitative and predictive models of innovation dynamics. The paper also discusses the epistemological issues associated with this type of research.