  Innovation, typically spurred by reusing, recombining, and synthesizing
existing concepts, is expected to result in an exponential growth of the
concept space over time. However, our statistical analysis of TechNet, which is
a comprehensive technology semantic network encompassing over four million
concepts derived from patent texts, reveals a linear rather than exponential
expansion of the overall technological concept space. Moreover, there is a
notable decline in the originality of newly created concepts. These trends can
be attributed to the constraints of human cognitive abilities to innovate
beyond an ever-growing space of prior art, among other factors. Integrating
creative artificial intelligence (CAI) into the innovation process holds the
potential to overcome these limitations and alter the observed trends in the
future.
