I generally find from conversations that there are those who believe innovation stems from core teams under pressure and those who think it spawns from loosely connected networks. These are very different views of the universe, beyond how it may change. One is Ptolemaic, revolving around a person or team. One is Copernican, recognizing it doesn't revolve around your organization. More on the greeks later, for now lets turn to what's new in the daily dish, according to some network surveyors of Ivy affiliation:
Fleming and his colleagues found, for example, that at the end of the last decade, half of the patented inventors in Silicon Valley could trace an indirect collaborative path to one another...
"Our work and more recent work on knowledge diffusion demonstrates that knowledge flows along these collaborative relationships, even years after they were formed," says Fleming. At the same time, the world of inventors "is getting smaller," he says, "inventors are more connected to their colleagues in outside firms, and that knowledge is diffusing in both directions."
Fleming uses the analogy of a cave to describe network clusters, which reminds me of Plato's cave -- where your reality is what you perceive, or what you perceive could just be a reflection of what's outside the cave you are trapped in unknowingly. In other words, its more than fine to be trapped in an echo chamber so long as you realize you are in one, the acoustics can't be beat.
Valdis Krebs taught me something simple that works two years ago. That a healthy network has both a densely linked core and a dynamic edge. New ideas have to reach the network and then have an efficient means of processing it. Formulated memes need means.
A big part of my Copernican Universe for this post is from the Guardian's Simon Walderman:
The real danger for newspapers - and indeed all traditional media - when venturing online, isn’t these detailed questions about who charges for what, or what an individual site’s impact is on an individual publication. It’s that the media owner involved fails to understand their role in the online universe, and fundamentally fails as a result of it.
But its late, and the Earth has already revolved in Simon's favor. So, to make sure I have the right three old greeks, I'll beg a question.
I'll assume you feel your world is getting smaller, what have you done to make it bigger today?
