Abstract
There has been recently an upsurge of interest in networks in a literature which belongs to many different disciplines, ranging from physics to biology to the social sciences. Interestingly enough, it seems that in spite of the wide differences between the entities constituting such networks, ranging from the interactions of biological molecules in cells to the Internet to citations (Barabasi et al., 1999, Barabasi, 2002; Barabasi and Bonabeau, 2003; Cohen, 2002; Watts and Strogatz, 1998), most such studies claim some kind of common intellectual framework rooted in complexity science. Yet the literature on networks does not provide any link between networks and other parts of the science of complexity which could be considered more fundamental. This contribution will proceed first to identify some possible connections between networks and other theories of complexity; second, to describe and analyse some networks of knowledge and innovation and to interpret their properties in terms of recent studies of networks; third, to formulate some generalizations about the dynamics of these networks and about their connection to the dynamics of variety and efficiency.
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Saviotti, P.P. (2009). Knowledge Networks: Structure and Dynamics. In: Pyka, A., Scharnhorst, A. (eds) Innovation Networks. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92267-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92267-4_2
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