Talk Topic: Collaborative Innovation Networks - Coolhunting Through Swarmcreativity
Peter Gloor, MIT
August 20, 2008

Abstract
This talk introduces Collaborative Innovation Networks, or COINs. COINs are cyberteams of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by technology to collaborate in creating a cool trend - an innovation - by sharing ideas, information, and work. COINs have been around for hundreds of years. Many of us have already been a part of one without knowing it. What makes COINs so relevant today is that the concept has reached its tipping point - thanks to the Internet and the World Wide Web. COINs are powered by swarm creativity. People work together in a structure that enables a fluid creation and exchange of ideas. It may look chaotic from the outside, but the structure of a COIN is like a beehive or ant colony, immensely productive because each team member knows intuitively what she or he needs to do.

"Coolhunting" puts COINs to productive use. Coolhunting in organizations - discovering, analyzing, and measuring trends and trendsetters - means observing social networks through face-to-face interaction, the Web, blogs, newspapers and magazines, broadcast media, and society at large to spot the new things that will become cool. Patterns of collaborative innovation always follow the same path, from creator to COIN to collaborative learning network to collaborative interest network. When it comes to tracking and analyzing COIN ecosystems, Condor, a software tool developed over the last 5 years at MIT, Dartmouth, Cologne and Helsinki, uses dynamic social network analysis to identify communication patterns through time to chart complex group dynamics. It creates cybermovies of communication flows from various input sources such as e-mail, Web site links, and blogs, to trace interaction in social networks. This talk draws on work with more than 40 organizations during the past decade and is based on Peter's latest two books Coolhunting - Chasing Down the Next Big Thing" (with Scott Cooper) published by AMACOM spring 2007 and "Swarm Creativity - Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks", published in 2006 at Oxford University Press.

Bio
Peter A. Gloor is a Research Scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT's Sloan School of Management where he leads a project exploring Collaborative Innovation Networks (www.ickn.org) and Chief Creative Officer of startup galaxyadvisors. Peter is Mercator Visiting Professor at the University of Cologne, and a lecturer at Helsinki University of Technology. Until the end of 2002, Peter was a Partner with Deloitte Consulting, leading its E-Business practice for Europe. Before that, he was a Partner with Pricewarterhouse Coopers and the Section Leader for Software Engineering at Union Bank of Switzerland. Earlier, Peter was a Senior Research Fellow at the Dartmouth Tuck Center for Digital Strategies and an adjunct faculty in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Zurich in 1989. Peter blogs about Swarm Creativity at swarmcreativity.blogspot.com and is currently involved in developing the social networking and data visualization software Condor.