In Science, Some Ideas Are More Contagious Than Others

The model showed that ideas originating at prestigious institutions caused bigger “epidemics” than equally good ideas from less prominent places, explains Allison Morgan, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author of the new study. First they looked at how five big ideas in computer science spread to new institutions. The researchers’ model suggests that there “may be a number of quite good ideas that originate in the middle of the pack, in terms of universities,” Clauset says.

Source: www.scientificamerican.com