The Size and Shape of “Idea Space”

July 4, 2012 Editor 0

In a large idea management system it is very useful to have a general purpose “ideas like this” capability. Such a tool can be used to define a distance between two ideas, and with a distance metric it is possible to explore the dimensionality and size of a space. Using feature-based Jaccard-Tanimoto similarity, we find that “idea space” is consistently about 14-dimensional regardless of the origin or specifics of the ideas, which has some practical consequences for the behavior and display of similarity search results. In addition, given a distance within which people judge ideas to be “practically identical”, the size of the universe of ideas can (whimsically) be estimated at 6 billion ideas.

• Content Type Journal Article
• Category Research Article
• Pages 71-76
• DOI 10.1260/1757-2223.4.2.71
• Authors
  • Robin W. Spencer, Imaginatik PLC

• Journal International Journal of Innovation Science
• Print ISSN 1757-2223
• Journal Volume Volume 4
• Journal Issue Volume 4, Number 2 / June 2012

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Categories: Innovation

Tags: idea, space