The idea for this book started when we organized a topical workshop entitled “Innovation Networks – New Approaches in Modeling and Analyzing” (held in Augsburg, Germany in October 2005), under the auspices of Exystence, a network of excellence funded in the European Union’s Fifth Framework Program. Unlike other conferences on innovation and networks, however, this workshop brought together scientists from economics, sociology, communication science, science and technology studies, and physics. With this book we aim to build further on a bridge connecting the bodies of knowledge on networks in economics, the social sciences and, more recently, statistical physics.

The science of graphs and networks has become by now a well-established tool for modelling and analyzing a variety of systems with a large number of interacting components. Starting from the physical sciences, applications have spread rapidly to the natural and social sciences, as well as to economics, and are now further extended, in this volume, to the concept of innovations, viewed broadly. In an abstract, systems-theoretical approach, innovation can be understood as a critical event which destabilizes the current state of the system, and results in a new process of self-organization leading to a new stable state. The contributions to this anthology address different aspects of the relationship between innovation and networks. The various chapters incorporate approaches in evolutionary economics, agent-based modeling, social network analysis and econophysics and explore the epistemic tension between insights into economics and society-related processes, and the insights into new forms of complex dynamics.