Fueling a net-zero future: The influence of government-funded research on climate change mitigation inventions
Not Available
Wang, Jieshu (ORCID:0000000177259545)↗
Engineering topics
Strumsky, Deborah
Publications and source records attributed to Strumsky, Deborah.
A convergence research perspective on graduate education for sustainable urban systems science
Sustainable urban systems (SUS) science is a new science integrating work across established and emerging disciplines, using diverse methods, and addressing issues at local, regional, national, and global scales. Advancing SUS requires the next generation of scholars and practitioners to excel at synthesis across disciplines and possess the skills to innovate in the realms of research, policy, and stakeholder engagement. Here, we outline key tenets of graduate education in SUS, informed by historical and global perspectives. The sketch is an invitation to discuss how graduates in SUS should be trained to engage with the challenges and opportunities presented by continuing urbanization.
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
Graduate Education for a New Sustainable Urban Systems Science: Designing a New PhD Curriculum Integrating Sustainability Science and Urban Science
This is a report on the discussions held during an NSF SUS conference “Graduate Education for a New Sustainable Urban Systems Science: Designing a New PhD Curriculum Integrating Sustainability Science and Urban Science”. The conference was motivated by the call made by the NSF for “…developing the next generation of sustainable urban systems science.” The conference was premised on the assumption that such continued development will have need for the training of new generations of urban sustainability scientists, and that both the content and manner of training will be different from established degree programs.
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
Scaling and universality in urban economic diversification
Understanding cities is central to addressing major global challenges from climate change to economic resilience. Although increasingly perceived as fundamental socio-economic units, the detailed fabric of urban economic activities is only recently accessible to comprehensive analyses with the availability of large datasets. Here, we study abundances of business categories across US metropolitan statistical areas, and provide a framework for measuring the intrinsic diversity of economic activities that transcends scales of the classification scheme. A universal structure common to all cities is revealed, manifesting self-similarity in internal economic structure as well as aggregated metrics (GDP, patents, crime). We present a simple mathematical derivation of the universality, and provide a model, together with its economic implications of open-ended diversity created by urbanization, for understanding the observed empirical distribution. Given the universal distribution, scaling analyses for individual business categories enable us to determine their relative abundances as a function of city size. These results shed light on the processes of economic differentiation with scale, suggesting a general structure for the growth of national economies as integrated urban systems.
32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
Identifying the sources of technological novelty in the process of invention
Not Available
Strumsky, Deborah↗
Invention as a combinatorial process: evidence from US patents
Invention has been commonly conceptualized as a search over a space of combinatorial possibilities. Despite the existence of a rich literature, spanning a variety of disciplines, elaborating on the recombinant nature of invention, we lack a formal and quantitative characterization of the combinatorial process underpinning inventive activity. Here, we use US patent records dating from 1790 to 2010 to formally characterize invention as a combinatorial process. To do this, we treat patented inventions as carriers of technologies and avail ourselves of the elaborate system of technology codes used by the United States Patent and Trademark Office to classify the technologies responsible for an invention's novelty. We find that the combinatorial inventive process exhibits an invariant rate of ‘exploitation’ (refinements of existing combinations of technologies) and ‘exploration’ (the development of new technological combinations). This combinatorial dynamic contrasts sharply with the creation of new technological capabilities—the building blocks to be combined—that has significantly slowed down. We also find that, notwithstanding the very reduced rate at which new technologies are introduced, the generation of novel technological combinations engenders a practically infinite space of technological configurations.
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE SEEDS Program
Forecasting and influencing technological progress in solar energy: A new theory looks at an entire technological ecosystem, and understands a given technology in the context of its position within the entire technological ecosystem. Research has shown a major source of improvements in photovoltaics in recent years was improvements in its component technologies. Our research demonstrates that inputs are the primary driver of progress, and not just for solar, improvements in any given component technology is passed through to all the technologies for which that component is an input, and this process is iterated indefinitely. Such iterative processes enable us to classify technologies into trophic levels, analogous to food webs in ecology, based on their distance from natural resources. This theory predicts that technologies higher up in the technology food chain make progress faster than those below, due to the fact that they benefit from all the improvements in the all component technologies below them, technologies such as computers or photovoltaics. This at least partially explains why some technologies make more rapid progress than others.
14 SOLAR ENERGY↗