Exploring the Fundamental Conceptual Units of Technical Emergence

Abstract

The study of emerging technologies is broad and has multiple and often poorly integrated threads. For example, some literature draw from a number of characteristics such as radicalness, growth speed, coherence, impact, uncertainty and ambiguity while other only look at expected economic benefits. This fractured view of the growth of new technologies has created a hodgepodge of approaches and a dearth of fundamental measures within this research space. Recent efforts at developing a more fundamental measure of technological behavior have yielded "Technical Emergence" - a simple proposition which seeks to measure the growth of concepts within a community of users by tracking Novelty, Persistence, Community and Growth. This fundamental unit induces the possibility to actually measure and, more importantly test, its behavior using repeatable bibliometric techniques. We discuss in detail the conceptual origins and evaluate the concept of technological emergence and relations of indicators to it.

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