The article describes a new mathematical model of innovation patterns. The model accounts for unexpected breakthroughs as well as anticipated developments, a feature not seen in previous ones.

This model ties in with the Objectivist view of conceptualizing, which Ayn Rand describes as “an actively sustained process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one’s perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sum.” –Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Ethics.

According to the authors, their model applies both to novelties - “they are new to an individual” – and to innovations - “they are new to the world.” Conceptualizing can lead to either outcome. The model builds on an earlier theory of the “adjacent possible”, defined in the article as “all those things—ideas, words, songs, molecules, genomes, technologies and so on—that are one step away from what actually exists.” This ties in with the Objectivist view that integration of existing conceptual and perceptual data occurs in discrete steps.

Although this model neither contradicts nor extends the Objectivist theory of concept formation, it sheds light on the actual process by which new concepts and ideas originate and propagate within a society or culture.