  Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural
things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social
sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them
unnavigable. This complexity results from innovation's importance for society,
but also the fundamental paradox underlying innovation science: When innovation
becomes predictable, it ceases to be an engine of novelty and change. Here we
review innovation studies and show that innovations emerge from contexts of
discord and disorder, breaches in the structure of prior success, through a
process we term destructive creation. This often leads to a complementary
process of creative destruction whereby local structures protect and channel
the diffusion of successful innovations, rendering alternatives obsolete. We
find that social scientists naturally focus far more on how social and cultural
contexts influence material innovations than the converse. We highlight
computational tools that open new possibilities for the analysis of novel
content and context in interaction, and show how this brings us empirically
toward the broader range of possibilities that complex systems and science
studies have theorized-and science fiction has imagined-the social, cultural
and material structures of innovation conditioning each other's change through
cycles of disruption and development.

Physics and Society