A meta-model for studying the coevolution of knowledge and collaboration networks

Abstract

Guimerà and his colleagues proposed an interesting modelto study the evolution of collaboration networks, in which the creative teams are the basic building blocks of the collaboration network and the network grows by repetitively assimilating new teams. We argue that one limitation of this GUSA model is that the intrinsic mutual influence of the collaboration network and the collective production and diffusion of knowledge in the network is largely neglected. Based on this argumentation, we in this paper propose an abstract meta-model that extends and generalizes the GUSA model in order to study the evolutionary dynamics of collaboration networks with the team assembly mechanism. By integrating the mechanism of team-wide knowledge production and diffusion, the proposed meta-model provides a unified framework to simultaneously study knowledge dynamics and structural evolution of the network. In tune with the proposed meta-model, an agent-based modeling framework is briefly discussed. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.