Ideas

Our selection of developments related to business, but in particular to network-based innovation and markets for human capital.

Smart Mobs, a website and weblog by Howard Rheingold

Introduction by Jim Park:
This is a website and weblog dedicated to the concept of “Smart Mobs” coined by Howard Rheingold. Smart mobs emerge when technologies—such as mobile communication devices and pervasive computing—amplify human talents for cooperation. This site is an excellent resource for staying informed and educated about emerging technologies and how they are being applied in the context of human networks.

09-26-05
Business Week
Best of the New Web

Introduction by Jim Park:
This interesting series of articles demonstrates that the Web is not just about surfing anymore. It's becoming a doorway into services that help global communities convene around shared areas of interest for the purpose of creating, collaborating on, and sharing content in unique and innovative ways. In addition to commentary on the subject, this special report lists top new websites relevant to all aspects of our lives: home, work, and play.

09-19-05 Online Revolution, By Richard Waters

In the internet age, it seems, the next big idea to change your industry may come from an unexpected direction.

As related* by Eric von Hippell, professor of management and innovation at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, followers of extreme sports have become expert at adapting and refining the equipment they use. Sometimes, the way these informal communities work can look very similar to the way open source software developers create their elaborate products.

09-19-05
The Big Moo, by the Group of 33, edited by Seth Godin

Stop Trying to be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable
THE BIG MOO is an unprecedented collaboration of 33 of the world's smartest business thinkers, blending their ideas on how you can remarkablize your organization.

Find out more about the authors
Read an excerpt

Autumn 2005
Report / Image and meaning
Making visible the invisible
by Stuart McKee

(Excerpt)
The photographer Felice Frankel, a research scientist in the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), believes that designers have much to teach scientists about how to think visually. Frankel comes up with ways to amplify the visual values of what her colleagues – and often her colleagues only – see in the course of their research. As much as she relies on them for the arresting images she creates of their hidden worlds, she also winds up making them nervous.

09-08-05
Eamonn Kelly and Steve Weber talk about A Delicate Balance Between Risk and Reward in an article published by FT.com, September 8, 2005. (PDF 71kb)

(Excerpt)
A common perception of risk is that it is something to be
avoided and minimised. But if they are to succeed in the
long term, businesses also need to remind themselves that
risk-taking is a powerful source of reward and opportunity.

06-20-05
The Power of Us: Mass Collaboration on the Internet is Shaking Up Business
Business Week

(Synopsis)
The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide—along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more—are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical. “There’s a fundamental shift in power happening,” says Pierre M. Omidyar, founder and chairman of the online marketplace eBay Inc. “Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they're involved in.”

06-20-05
Tour the Collectives of Cyberspace
Business Week online extra

(Excerpt)
The Internet isn't just about e-mail or the Web anymore. Increasingly, people online are taking the power of the Internet back into their own hands. They're posting opinions on online journals—Web logs, or blogs. They're organizing political rallies on MoveOn.org. They're trading songs on shady file-sharing networks. They're volunteering articles for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and they're collaborating with other programmers around the world. It's the emergence of the Power of Us. Thanks to new technologies such as blog software, peer-to-peer networks, open-source software, and wikis (group-edited Web sites), people are getting together to take collective action on an unprecedented scale.

04-11-05
Forward, by Chris Meyer (PDF 31kb)
Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy, by Ron Goldman, Richard P. Gabriel

From the Forward by Chris Meyer:
Innovation Happens Elsewhere is at least as important for those who have no interest in software as for those who do, because in the details of the history and practice of the open source community lie clues to the institutional adaptations of the information economy; in the clauses of the software licenses presented here lie the case law that will come to define property in the information age. There are other books that have a great deal to say about this evolution, but Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel offer the unique inside-out insight gained in flesh-and-blood open source projects and personal roles developing the structures that have supported them.

The Wisdom of Crowds, a book by James Surowiecki

Review by Publisher’s Weekly:
While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition, coordination, and cooperation. "Wise crowds", Surowiecki says, need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions.

December 2004
a GBN Conversation with Pierre Omidyar
Spreading the Gospel of the Bottom-Up,
Interview conducted by Peter Leyden

(Excerpt)
From the earliest days of eBay, founder Pierre Omidyar never ceased to be amazed at what he saw emerge. He was surprised that the website he created for fun over Labor Day weekend in 1995 attracted enthusiastic users right from the start. He was surprised when this side hobby soon started generating more income than his day job. He was surprised at how quickly his new business grew through the 1990s and how a real sense of trust and community emerged among what soon became millions of members. And he was surprised—more like astounded—at the multibillion-dollar fortune that eBay generated for him. The element of surprise is a key characteristic of any bottom-up, emergent phenomenon, and eBay is the ultimate example of that kind of phenomenon in the business world.

12-16-03
Deciding on Contact Collaboration, by Cesar Brea
Social networking is hot, but ultimate value to professionals depends on criteria for value, privacy, simplicity

Excerpt:
Social networking solutions that help professionals pursue business development through relationships, as opposed to the more conventional — and increasingly less effective — "cold" approaches, have been touted as the "next big thing" in the world of Internet applications.

With all the hype in the category, it's hard to wade through all of the options to make smart choices. Yet, the right solution can make a big difference in an otherwise tough economic climate.

October 2003
Work on Networks, an article by Clay Shirky
Global Business Network

(Excerpt)
Networks have transformed business in the last decade. The explosion in communications networks, and the subsequent transformation of the social, is obvious. Knowing how to extract value from those changes, however, is much harder. Much has changed and much is still changing in the way we understand networks. In particular, thanks to work in the last five to 10 years, we have a much deeper understanding of the way human networks work and a much greater ability to visualize those networks. We can finally begin to predict how networks will behave over time.