The Adaptive Innovation Cycle Law
Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Innovation is usually told as a story of intention: a problem is identified, researchers search for a solution, a breakthrough is found, and the market eventually adopts it. Reality is often far less orderly. Many important innovations begin with anomalies, failed experiments, unexpected effects, unusual recombinations, or technologies created for purposes entirely different from those that later make them transformative. Most such deviations disappear. Only a few are preserved, validated, translated across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, supplied with capital and complementary infrastructure, accepted by society, and turned into durable technological capability. The Adaptive Innovation Law of Unsearched Breakthroughs develops a unified framework for understanding this entire process. It asks not only how breakthroughs emerge, but why some remain invisible, why bottlenecks migrate as technologies mature, why investment can produce radically different returns at different stages, why markets systematically concentrate capital in some technological directions while leaving others underexplored, and why technically viable innovations may still encounter economic, institutional, psychological, or social resistance. The theory then follows technology beyond invention. Knowledge is treated not merely as stored information, but as a distributed capacity maintained through people, tools, institutions, suppliers, routines, calibration, repair, and transmission. Technologies can therefore become dormant or effectively lost even when documents and artifacts survive—and later return through a different generative pathway rather than through literal restoration. Twelve locally testable laws connect breakthrough formation with technological memory, persistence, loss, reconstruction, investment scaling, capital canalization, transition burden, strategic inhibition, and social resistance. The framework is deliberately designed to remain falsifiable: individual laws are tested through minimal identification models and must outperform simpler competing explanations. The central question of the paper is therefore broader than How are inventions created? It is: How does a civilization become capable of creating something new—and what allows it to keep that capability alive?
Author: Krakowski, Sławomir
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7086777164
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