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Models such as the Bass diffusion model impose an epidemiological structure on the contagion of products, with a survival analysis flavour. Or, if you’d like, memetics but for technical ideas rather than beliefs.
1 Incoming
Kalyani et al. (2025):
We identify phrases associated with novel technologies using textual analysis of patents, job postings, and earnings calls, enabling us to identify four stylized facts on the diffusion of jobs relating to new technologies. First, the development of economically impactful new technologies is geographically highly concentrated, more so even than overall patenting: 56% of the most economically impactful technologies come from just two U.S. locations, Silicon Valley and the Northeast Corridor. Second, as the technologies mature and the number of related jobs grows, hiring spreads geographically. But this process is very slow, taking around 50 years to disperse fully. Third, while initial hiring in new technologies is highly skill biased, over time the mean skill level in new positions declines, drawing in an increasing number of lower-skilled workers. Finally, the geographic spread of hiring is slowest for higher-skilled positions, with the locations where new technologies were pioneered remaining the focus for the technology’s high-skill jobs for decades.
(Via Joe Walker.)
Getting The Word Out—by Steven Johnson
I wrote about the disappointing—though I suppose not surprising—lack of coverage of the death of Dilip Mahalanabis, the Bangladeshi doctor who played a critical role in popularising Oral Rehydration Therapy, the amazingly simple medical intervention that has saved millions of lives around the world over the past fifty years. I noted that as far as I could tell, no mainstream news organization outside of India had run so much as a brief obituary of Mahalanabis, despite the heroic nature of his initial adoption of ORT in the middle of a refugee crisis in the early 1970s, and the long-term legacy of his work. (The Lancet once called ORT “potentially the most important medical advance of the 20th century”.) …when we talk about the history of innovation, we often over-index on the inventors and underplay the critical role of popularizers, the people who are unusually gifted at making the case for adopting a new innovation, or who have a platform that gives them an unusual amount of influence.