Innovation

June and I chatted this morning about the centrality of innovation in our network weaving work. Everyone we work with is after one or both kinds of change: scaling what you're already doing, and doing something new (innovation).

Network weaving is particularly powerful with innovation because we're connecting people with the kind of diversity that is always essential to the R&D of innovation. Diversity of ideas, perspectives, intentions, resources, access, and opportunities. The more we connect with people outside our personal (1st) circle, the diversity becomes more and more guaranteed.

Of course learning how to connect these people in collaboration toward innovation is a social technology that we will continue to offer in our workshops

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WWW - World Wide Weaving

Local network weaving is great, but global network weaving is better!

I am blogging from Riga, Latvia, where this week I participated in some great meetings and some great introductions.

Above is a simple network map of the organizations involved. The links show who has collaborated with whom before this week. All of the organizations, except for orgnet.com, are from the EU -- most from Latvia. After having worked with a great group of new media artists @ RIXC and some brilliant mathematicians and computer guys @ SIS, I knew it was time for some introductions. All of the above organizations/groups were represented at the meeting in the Old Town section of Riga. One introduction led to another, and soon plans were being formulated for future projects, sharing technology, new conferences, teaching classes, and introductions to possible sources of finance.

The network below depicts the group after the week, with the green links revealing productive introductions that were made and are currently being pursued for collaboration and innovation.



Compare the "closed triangles" between the two network diagrams... see how connectivity grows?

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Making Introductions

patternHunter observes...

One of the challenges with "social networking" sites is that most are more correctly "social linking" sites.

...they are all like bad parties where everyone is gathered in small circles with their backs to anyone new. One of the benefits of a good host/hostess (other than attracting an interesting crowd) is his/her ability to introduce individuals to other individuals who are likely to share some kind of interest. To my knowledge, no social networking site is particularly good at making introductions and most do not even try.

Right on. We train networkweavers to make useful & actionable introductions.

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