“Understanding innovation is vital to guide it”

Marija Mitrović Dankulov

“We have to tell policymakers that we need to understand before we start guiding innovation”

Marija Mitrović Dankulov is an associate professor at the Scientific Computing Laboratory of the Institute of Physics in Belgrade, Serbia. She researches the statistical physics of complex systems, recently the structure and dynamics of social groups and collective knowledge building. She also works at an innovation centre.

And it is innovation, and the application of complexity science, that she focuses on in her talk.

Innovation is defined in different ways by different people, Marija says at the beginning of her talk. For many of us, an innovation is just “something new.” But when she joined the innovation centre, Marija found that industry has a quite different definition: For industry, an innovation is something useful that will bring in money, or that changes the relationship with customers.

It is industry, and large institutions like the World Bank, that fund the innovation that shape society, Marija says. These institutions also influence policymakers who decide how we fund science. What everyone agrees, is that innovation is vital to the development of society.

Marija is convinced that complexity science can help to understand innovation and the innovation process. “It is well known,” she says, “that innovation, no matter in what area, is a universal process, and there are quantitative studies describing this process. Even better, is that there is a lot of free, publicly available data online to study these processes and better understand them.”

“The most important thing is that we have to tell policymakers, we have to tell people from the World Bank and these other big institutions, that before you want to guide the process, you have to understand it,” Marija concludes.

Click for Marija’s slides.

See the video in full lenght here: