Is the pace of innovation slowing down?

I am including a summarised version from the paper here.

Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes[1,2], wherein previous accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton’s words, ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’[3,4,5,6,7]
The decline is difficult to reconcile with centuries of observation by philosophers of science, who characterize the growth of knowledge as an endogenous process, wherein previous knowledge enables future discovery, a view captured famously in Newton’s observation that if he had seen further, it was by ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’[3]
We address these gaps in understanding by analysing 25 million papers (1945–2010) in the Web of Science (WoS) (Methods) and 3.9 million patents (1976–2010) in the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Patents View database (Methods)
To characterize the nature of innovation, we draw on foundational theories of scientific and technological change[2,29,30], which distinguish between two types of breakthroughs
Our analyses show that this trend is unlikely to be driven by changes in citation practices or the quality of published work
We see a decline in the diversity of work cited, indicating that contemporary science and technology are engaging with narrower slices of existing knowledge. This decline in diversity is accompanied by an increase in the share of citations to the 1% most highly cited papers and patents (Fig. 6a (i),d(i)), which are decreasing in semantic diversity (Fig. 6a (ii),d (ii))
Even though philosophers of science may be correct that the growth of knowledge is an endogenous process—wherein accumulated understanding promotes future discovery and invention—engagement with a broad range of extant knowledge is necessary for that process to play out, a requirement that appears more difficult with time

Discussion:

The authors report a marked decline in disruptive science and technology over time.
The decline represents a substantive shift in science and technology, one that reinforces concerns about slowing innovative activity.
The authors attribute this trend in part to scientists’ and inventors’ reliance on a narrower set of existing knowledge.
The authors’ observation of considerable churn in the underlying fields responsible for producing disruptive science and technology suggests the potential importance of factors such as the shifting interests of funders and scientists and the ‘ripeness’ of scientific and technologicalknowledge for breakthroughs, in which case the production of disruptive work may be responsive to policy levers.
Understanding the decline in disruptive science and technology more fully permits a much-needed rethinking of strategies for organizing the production of science and technology in the future
MethodsThe authors limit the focus to research papers published between 1945 and 2010. the WoS data begin in the year 1900, the scale and social organization of science shifted markedly in the post-war era, thereby making comparisons with the present difficult and potentially misleading[67,68,69].
In the second version, which the authors call ‘field × year normalized’, the authors subtract Nk by the average number of backward citations made by papers or patents in the focal paper or patent’s WoS research area or NBER technology category, respectively, during its year of publication (the authors label this quantity {N}_{{\rm{b}}}^{{\rm{m}}{\rm{e}}{\rm{a}}{\rm{n}}}Nbmean)
The intuition behind this adjustment is that in fields and time periods in which there is a greater tendency for scientists and inventors to cite previous work, Nk is likely to be larger, thereby leading to lower values of the CD index, again not necessarily as a result of the focal paper or patent being less disruptive.
These control variables help to account for these alternative explanations
FindingsThe authors see a decline in the diversity of work cited (Fig. 6a,d), indicating that contemporary science and technology are engaging with narrower slices of existing knowledge.
This decline in diversity is accompanied by an increase in the share of citations to the 1% most highly cited papers and patents (Fig. 6a (i),d(i)), which are decreasing in semantic diversity (Fig. 6a (ii),d (ii)).
The models indicate a consistent pattern for both science and technology, wherein the coefficients for diversity of work cited are positive and significant for papers (0.159, P < 0.01) and patents (0.069, P < 0.01), indicating that in fields in which there is more use of diverse work, there is greater disruption.
The coefficients of the interaction between mean age of work cited and dispersion in age of work cited is positive and significant for papers (0.000, P < 0.01) and patents (0.001, P < 0.01), suggesting that—holding the dispersion of the age of work cited constant—papers and patents that engage with older work are more likely to be disruptive
Code availabilityThey are drawn by identifying the median of the underlying distribution and recursively drawing boxes outward from there in either direction that encompass half of the remaining data
The authors evaluate the sensitivity of the results to the use of different forward citation windows when computing the CD index for papers (n = 24,659,076) and patents (n = 3,912,353).
The results mirror those reported in the main text, the decline is somewhat steeper using longer forward citation windows, suggesting the primary results may represent a more conservative estimate
The authors show changes in the ratio of unique to total words over time based on data from the abstracts of papers (a, n = 76 WoS research area × year observations) and patents (b, n = 229 NBER technology category × year observations).

Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time | Nature

In summary, we report a marked decline in disruptive science and technology over time. Our analyses show that this trend is unlikely to be driven by changes in citation practices or the quality of published work. Rather, the decline represents a substantive shift in science and technology, one that reinforces concerns about slowing innovative activity. We attribute this trend in part to scientists’ and inventors’ reliance on a narrower set of existing knowledge. Even though philosophers of science may be correct that the growth of knowledge is an endogenous process—wherein accumulated understanding promotes future discovery and invention—engagement with a broad range of extant knowledge is necessary for that process to play out, a requirement that appears more difficult with time. Relying on narrower slices of knowledge benefits individual careers⁵³, but not scientific progress more generally.

This is a recommended read.