Generalization and the Rise of System-level Creativity in Science

Innovation ecosystems require careful policy stewardship to drive sustained advance in human health, welfare, security and prosperity. We develop new measures that reliably decompose the influence of innovations in terms of the degree to which each represents a field-level foundation, an extension of foundational work, or a generalization that synthesizes and modularizes contributions from distant fields to catalyze combinatorial innovation. Using 23 million scientific works from OpenAlex and 19 million works from Web of Science, we demonstrate that while foundational and extensional work within fields has declined in recent years-a trend garnering much recent attention-generalizations across fields have increased and accelerated with the rise of the web, social media, and artificial intelligence, shifting the locus of innovation from within fields to across the system as a whole. We explore implications for science policy.