Excel and NetLogo files to accompany the book "Simulating Innovation: Computer-based tools for rethinking innovation", Christopher Watts & Nigel Gilbert, 2014.
These files were originally published on the website for the associated academic research project, SIMIAN. We make them available here on github to ensure they remain publicly accessible.
Github also provides a better means to alert users to any changes to the files. In particular, the NetLogo files were written for NetLogo 5.2, and version 6 of NetLogo introduced some significant changes to its syntax (e.g. anonymous procedures), which may mean NetLogo 6 cannot open and translate every .nlogo program automatically.
One way to deal with this is to install version 5.3.1 of NetLogo (multiple versions of NetLogo can remain installed on the same computer simultaneously), but not every reader of the book will be able to do this - e.g. university computers often restrict what ordinary users can install on them.
Alternatively, new versions of our .nlogo files can be produced for later versions of NetLogo. Few of the changes are likely to be difficult, but readers might not wish to attempt them themselves. This github page offers a means of contacting the programs' author to alert him about these issues, and to request updated versions.
If you have git installed on your computer already, the fastest way to obtain these files is to create a new directory, open git bash in that directory, and type:
git clone https://github.com/innovative-simulator/simulating-innovation
If unfamiliar with git, there are many introductions available on the web, and some of them actually easy to understand. git is a very powerful set of tools for sharing code and tracking its modifications, and well worth learning, even for only occasional programmers. But it comes with a steep learning curve.
These programs were developed for the book:
Watts, Christopher and Gilbert, Nigel (2014) “Simulating Innovation: Computer- based Tools for Rethinking Innovation”. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar.
If you use any of these programs in your work, please cite the book, as well as giving the URL for the website from which you downloaded the program and the date on which you downloaded it. A suitable form of citation for a program is:
Watts, Christopher (2014) “Name-of-file”. Retrieved 31 January 2024 from https://github.com/innovative-simulator/simulating-innovation.
These programs are free software: you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of version 3 of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for more details. These programs are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Those wishing to make commercial use of a program should contact the book’s authors to discuss terms.
Some of these programs have been designed to be run using NetLogo version 5, which can be obtained from http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/