Sunday 8 June 2014


Collaborative Innovation Networks




PETER GLOOR
MIT 
Center for Collective Intelligence



OVERVIEW: Every disruptive innovation is not the result of a lone inventor, but of a small group of likeminded individuals, working together in close collaboration to get their cool idea off the ground. They are leveraging the concept of swarm creativity, where this small team - the Collaborative Innovation Network (COIN) - empowered by the collaborative technologies of the Internet and social media, turns their creative labor of love into a product that changes the way how we think, work, or spend our day.
This talk describes a series of ongoing projects at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence with the goal of analyzing the new idea creation process through tracking human interaction patterns on three levels:
On the global level, macro- and microeconomic indicators such as the valuation of companies and consumer indices, or election outcomes, are predicted based on social media analysis on Twitter, Blogs, and Wikipedia. On the organizational level, productivity and creativity of companies and teams is measured through extracting 'honest signals' from communication archives such as company e-mail. On the individual level, individual and team creativity is analyzed through face-to-face interaction with sociometric badges and personal e-mail logs.    
The talk introduces the concept of coolhunting, finding new trends by finding the trendsetters, and coolfarming, helping the trendsetters getting their idea over the tipping point. The talk also presents the concept of 'Virtual Mirroring', increasing individual and team creativity by analyzing and optimizing five inter-personal interaction variables of honest communication: 'strong leadership', 'rotating leaders', 'balanced contribution', 'fast response', and 'honest sentiment.'

READINGS:
    Gloor, P. A., Krauss, J., Nann, S., Fischbach, K., & Schoder, D. (2009, August). Web science 2.0: Identifying trends through semantic social network analysis. In Computational Science and Engineering, 2009. CSE'09. International Conference on (Vol. 4, pp. 215-222). IEEE.
    Kleeb, R., Gloor, P. A., Nemoto, K., & Henninger, M. (2012). 
Wikimaps: dynamic maps of knowledgeInternational Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering2(2), 204-224.
    Gloor, P. (2010) Coolfarming - Turn Your Great Idea Into The Next Big Thing AMACOM, NY
    Gloor, P.  (2006) Swarm Creativity, Competitive Advantage Through Collaborative Innovation Networks. Oxford 


27 comments:

  1. Comment mesurer l’honnêteté des usagers?

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    1. stdev of positivity and negativity - so a huge over simplification

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  2. How could we do any mind reading through web? It seems to me impossible

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    1. What do you mean by "mind-reading"? Stevan would say that I'm reading your mind when I'm reading your comment that mind-reading is impossible.

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    2. We are constantly mind reading based on any action someone does. Based on the way someone is behaving we attempt to understand what they are thinking. That is how humans are wired and is the reason we have such large social networks (cities, the Web, and so on). When someone posts on the internet we can interpret their post to try to understand their state and thoughts. Yes, it would not be as accurate as if you heard their tone of voice and saw their body language, but we can still mind read based on text someone writes.

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    3. I think it is difficult to explain, understand or predict someone thought behind a computer, because things that we read don't have tone of the voice for example and it could also be a lie. Many disputes begin because we didn't interpreted text in a way that other expected.

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    4. De fait, y'a perte d'information quand on se contente du texte, de la même façon qu'il y a perte entre le téléphone et une vraie rencontrer 1-à-1. Mais c'est quand même de l'information.

      Je pense qu'il faut différencier les types de communications – certaines ne peuvent être faites avec succès qu'en personne, mais les textos sont parfais pour d'autres.

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    5. we are always doing mind-readoing by putting in the (shared) context in what somebody says over e-mail, Facebook wall, twitter, etc, the more shared context, the better the mind-reading
      (in the Luhman sense I am putting my own mirror neurons to work to interpret your state of mind)

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  3. I like the idea of medical ‘COINs’ (researcher, medical doctor, patient, and family). This system could produce new treatments, provide a support group, and enhance non-specific (including placebo) effects.

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    1. Yeah!. I like the idea COINs. This is the first time that I hear something about it.

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    2. healthcare is an excellent area for COINs, because "super"-patients, e.g. doctors who have children sufferings of Crohn's, or nurses who have diabetes themselves, are the best swarm to work on inventing cures.

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  4. My question for Professor Gloor is related to monetary incentive in crowds and in swarms. Some studies have shown that, when a task requires creative thinking, monetary incentive actually reduces productivity and output. My question is whether there is any robust data to show that an influx of money, power, and so forth into a swarm structure causing a shift toward crowd dynamics.

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    1. There is research by Bruno S. Frey, Dan Ariely, and Daniel Kahnemnann in behavioral economics on extrinsic compared to intrinsic motivation, and on humans versus econs which show that humans which are not paid perform much better

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    2. Thank you for the response, Professor Gloor!

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    3. I wonder if they perform better because they have chosen to take on a task without financial compensation for pleasure. I imagine if any of us stopped being paid for our day job, or if we worked so hard on an unpaid task that we lack sustenance, we would perform worse.

      I need more context to that claim that 'humans which are not paid perform much better'. Would Google and Facebook have become such massive companies if they had no financial incentive? I think I'll read the research you suggested for a better understanding.

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  5. There is often differentiated expectations for leaders to be male and white, at least in the West. I sort of feel there's something missing to a picture which fails to detect that and the implications it would have....

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    1. leaders tend to be male also in the eastern and southern world.
      but for instance in the healthcare COINs, I have found a lot of female leadership

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  6. I find it interesting you designate "crowd-" things as extrinsically motivated and "swarm-" things as intrinsically motivated. Do you think things like crowdsourced art and crowdsourced funding are extrinsically motivated? Or is "swarm-sourced" the proper terminology?

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    1. this is really just a question of terminology.
      I asked climate change proponents if they were part of the crowd, which they denied, they consider themselves to be the experts.
      In a swarm, everybody is part of it - just with the bees

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  7. Is it sufficient to use the Communication pattern to predict the future of the start-up, sure the communication aspect can play a role but we know that is a lot of other factors can play against these start up even they were in the middle of the communication network ?

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    1. you are right that there is a lot of other factors responsible for success (e.g. the burst of a tech bubble), but still communication patterns offer a great microscope into the inner workings of a startup

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  8. Once you know the variables that contribute to creativity and productivity in groups, is there a way to create these conditions deliberately within a pre-existing group or team?

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  9. one thing to do is "virtual mirroring" showing people how they do with regards to the six variables, then they will improve on them - this worked really well so far.

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  10. Dear Peter, Thank you very for sharing your fascinating works ! I have a few questions : (1) Which rythm can we hope in the transmission and the coverage of innovation in Wikipedia? How can we model this dynamic by text mining and visualization? (2) How to define priorities to produce Wikipedia articles about innovations? (3) How do you think Wikipedia contribute to the innovation by a communication of new ideas in multiple languages? Do you think Wikipedia can be a vector of innovation by the way of automatic translation of Wikipedia pages dedicated to innovations and technologies?

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    1. Wikipedia is sometimes extremely fast, hours after something was published the first time. This can be measured by analyzing the timestamps of the edit history.
      Prioritization of all Wikipedia articles is by quality, but also by external metrics such as Google Pagerank, this also applies to articles on innovation
      I think that the path of ideas in languages other than English goes through the English Wikipedia. If for example there is a truly innovative idea in France, it will get an entry in the French Wikipedia, and then if it gains traction, it will be added to the English Wikipedia, and then from there to other languages. Automatic translation is not of very high quality

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  12. I find this notion that we can predict stock market fluctuations based on information gleaned from the web, blogs, and forums somewhat perplexing. If these technologies were used to inform prediction markets and trader choices (which, if I understand correctly, are already impacted by the activity of prediction markets), would that not change the dynamics of the market, and thus invalidate the prediction? It's the classic problem in sci-fi movies, where a character goes back in time but has to be careful not to tell anybody anything about the future, otherwise it will change.

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