The emergence and development of new concepts in the minds of scientists has been a major and common subject and focus point in philosophy of science, history of science, and cognitive science. Models and theories in this research area have been developed to characterize precisely the mechanisms by which novel concepts evolve in science. These models mainly have been developed by reflecting on natural sciences. In this paper, we have tried to examine one of those models to analyse an important case of conceptual development in social sciences. We have tried to provide a reconstruction of the development of national innovation system concept in Alborg University using a theory of conceptual combination. The results of our analysis indicate that conceptual combinations in natural and social sciences follow the general lines of a similar pattern. These analyses, however, show that conceptual combinations in social sciences are more complicated and do not fit into a precise algorithm.
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