Coolhunting Today's Iranian Presidential Elections

This weekend the Iranians are electing a new president. Incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad competes against reformist candidates Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezaee. It seems that Ahmadinejad's fiery rethoric did little to help him improve his chances to win the elections, at least on the Web.
Coolhunting with Condor today for the frontrunner on the Web and the Blogs, once on the entire Web, and once restricted to the "ir" Iranian domain brought a clear picture: not once was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad leading.

First the global analysis, searching the entire blogosphere

and then the entire Web.

It seems as if Mehdi Karroubi would be emerging as the clear leader, at least on the global (uncensored) Internet!

Now restricted only to blogs within the Iranian domain:

And finally all Web sites within the "ir" Iranian domain:


Inside Iran, the three reform candidates are tied with Mir-Hossein Mousavi slightly ahead on blogs, and Mohsen Rezaee the clear leader on the Web, Ahmadinejad is again coming in last. As the blogosphere is the better short term predictor, Mousavi would be the leading candidate this evening inside Iran.

Just for fun, here is also the linking structure of the global Web sites talking about the four candidates:

Note the central position of Karoubi and Mousavi, with the large blue (Karoubi) and brown (Mousavi) Webs. Ahmadinejad has a far flung, but very thin Web (green). Mousavi is in the center, and Karoubi has a tight network, reflecting his well-organized support network.

Based on this coolhunting, Web Buzz today seems to favor Mousavi and Karroubi. Tomorrow we will know more.

Who innovates better - the small or the tall?

Today's New York Times has an article by Steve Lohr "Who Says innovation Belongs to the Small?" which makes the argument that "These days, more than ever, size matters in the innovation game".

I beg to differ.

While it might be true that it takes the resources of large companies to implement fundamentally new things, large companies are extremely bad in recognizing the value of these fundamentally new things. Managers like to preserve the status quo, which means that new ideas inside a large company have a much harder time to succeed than if they are set free in the ecosystem of small startups reminiscent of the wild wild west. Other articles in today's NYT give compelling examples, such as bestselling author Jim Collins and Daniel Carasso, founder of Yoghurt giant Danone. It would be hard to envision for both Carasso and Collins to have found any traction for their groundbreaking ideas in large organizations. People with radically new ideas have a hard time to succeed in large organizations. Rather, they follow what I call the three-year-rule: Once they come to a new organization, they identify and try to implement new ideas inside their company. After three years of trying and being frustrated multiple times they usually leave the company and start afresh at another organization. Or, like Messrs Collins and Carasso, they don't join any new organization anymore, but start on their own. But they might still leave some of their creative ideas behind which are then picked up by the large company, leading to success stories like the ones described in Mr. Lohrs' article, such as IBM creating a large datamining system, or (even!) Microsoft starting some social software applications.

So, to put it in a nutshell, it does not matter at all if the innovation is promoted by a large or a small organization, what matters is the collective intelligence and creativity of the creators of the innovation, how well they are embedded into a support network, which can be inside or outside an existing organization. All things being equal, I'd rather say, in agreement with Clayton Christensen's arguments, that chances outside of organizational boundaries and restrictions are much better for a new idea to succeed. Sorry, Mr. Lohr.

Creative Ideas as Galactic Black Holes

“Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.” – Victor Hugo (loose translation)

When following the diffusion of a cool new idea in a social network, an interesting similarity with the structure of our universe and its stars and galaxies can be recognized. Readers of “Swarm Creativity – Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks” know that a cool idea runs through several stages before becoming widely influential and accepted. At first there is a creator who has a brilliant solution for something. Then, his idea attracts a small group of people who consequently work on spreading the word – until it eventually makes its way into a general known concept which is adapted by a larger crowd in the social net. The final stage is the interest network – this is when the idea has been widely recognized and most people in the social network already know about it or even use it.

How does this compare to the structure of stars and galaxies? A common theory of cosmologists nowadays is that every larger galaxy has a black hole in its center, holding together the stars of the galaxy with its ginormous gravity. So, if we consider the black hole center being a creator who attracts people (stars) with his gravity (idea), how would the whole process of an idea’s evolution be reflected in these terms? Of course it would compare to the creation of a new galaxy.

When a star with a certain minimum mass “dies”, meaning its thermonuclear fusion processes run out of hydrogen, it is the birth hour for a new black whole. Thus, the fusion processes can be considered to be the creator “brainstorming” his new idea. When emergence of the idea has reached a certain stage, the creator starts spreading it to other people – the birth of the black hole. A black hole’s nature is to never release anything which went past its event horizon, thus agglomerating mass and consequently increasing gravity. For our creator/black hole analogy this is the phase of where the creator elaborates and develops his idea further and thereby increasing its attraction potential (gravity in terms of black holes).

At a point, the mass of the black hole will become so great that it actually starts drawing other stars in its surrounding area, bringing them to orbit around it. This is, as for the analogy, when the creator assembles a group of believers who begin working on further developing and spreading his idea. Because the orbiting stars themselves also draw further stars with their own gravity (the believers spread the word), the few initial ones will be joined by more after a while. Over time, a local system of stars (the learning network) and eventually a whole galaxy (interest network) is formed that way, with a galactic black hole in its center.

This is not where it ends. We could now examine what reflects ideas which did not make it beyond the second stage (the black hole could not draw enough mass – the idea was not “cool” enough, or the creator was a bad communicator of making it plausible to other people) or how new black holes form inside the galaxy (new ideas emerge in the interest network). I invite you to give your own thoughts in the comments for now.

If you would like to know more about the evolution of galaxies I recommend the Wikipedia links below.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy


2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_formation_and_evolution


3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

It doesn't look good for the Republicans, or does it?

Today's attack of Dick Cheney against Colin Powell, who 'd rather choose Rush Limbaugh over Powell prompted me to check what the Web buzz is saying about the Republicans against Democrats, using our CoolTrend application. At first, checking Web buzz at large, I got the expected result:

The Democrats lead on the Web, with 53% over 47%. But then I took a closer look at the spiderweb of web links deciding on the percentages of Web buzz. Compared to older pictures, where the Republican Web sites always were closely clustered, while the Democratic Web sites were widely spread out, the Republican Web these days is similarly scattered:


This means that a lot of discussion and soul searching is going on in the Republican parts of the Web, with many dissenting opinions, as reflected in today's comment of Cheney on Powell.
I then repeated the same query restricted to the blogosphere, because what is said by bloggers today, frequently becomes mainstream opinion tomorrow. I got quite a surprising result, the blogsphere was evenly split: both Democrats and Republicans got exactly 50%. And the Blogger network structure reflects that result also:

So no need to write off the Republicans prematurely. They are undergoing a lot of discussion and goal setting, with a network structure which right now looks surprisingly similar to the Democratic one, but at least in the Blogosphere, they are even with the Democrats.

ORF Swarmcreativity Podcast (in German)

This week I participated in the EduMedia eCreativity Conference in Salzburg, Austria. The Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) was also present, and put togethera very nice online interview and podcast describing the foundations of Swarm Creativity (in German)

Predicting the Iranian Presidential Elections?

Recently I was asked if I could predict the outcome of the Iranian Presidential elections on June 12, 2009, based on what people are saying on Blogs and the Web about the candidates. Unfortunately this is a much harder task than predicting the US Presidential elections, or the Zurich Mayoral elections, as our system is not set up to parse and rank Farsi Web sites.

Nevertheless, I was curious what I would find out. I took the leading candidates from the Wikipedia page. They are Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current incumbent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who is running as an independent, and Mehdi Karroubi. There is a whole list of other potential candidates listed on Wikipedia, which I ignored for my tests. I included Mohammad Khatami, former President of Iran, who has endorsed Mousavi.

Below is the Condor/CoolTrend picture of what the English Web said for the last four days:

Mehdi Karoubi leads the Web Buzz in the US/English Web.
In the US/English Blogosphere, the picture is different:

Current incumbent Ahmadinejad is leading. Based on prior analysis of many other elections, Blogs predict the trend fairly well, so things look bright for Ahmadinejad, at least today.
BUT, this is only on English blogs. So let's look what Iranian Web sites and blogs say. As we don't have a Farsi analysis system, I just entered the same query into CoolTrend, limiting it however to the "ir" domain. A very different picture is emerging. Inside Iran, on the Web, Mousavi and Kahatimi, who is supporting Mousavi, are leading:

The same picture is true for the blogosphere, Khatami and Mousavi are leading. This is confirmed by a poll from late March, which puts Mousavi ahead.

The final picture shows the social network of candidates and their shares today (April 13, 2009), restricted to Iranian Web sites. As our system can not handle Farsi characters, only the candidates' names are displayed, the URLs could not be shown:

So, on the Internet, we know who the next Iranian President might be, at least for today: Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

Panopticon or Bee Hive – living in total transparency

People need to be watched, otherwise they will not do their job. That was the idea of Jeremy Bentham, who designed a prison, the Panopticon, where every prisoner could easily be watched by much fewer guards.

Today there is software that does a similar job. For example, LiveJobs, a company that operates virtual call centers all over the US, distinguishes itself from competitors by meticulously tracking performance of its call center agents. Whether it is selling insurance, transcribing documents, or taking pizza delivery calls, LiveOps software monitors individual performance on the most granular level, and delivers it to both LiveOps management and the individual employee.

So, in a sense, big brother is always watching. People are “operating in total transparency”. At least for LiveOps employees, this does not seem to be such a bad thing. They continuously check their own performance every day. If they don’t perform, they will not be fired, but they will not get more work from LiveOps.

For knowledge workers, monitoring e-mail does provide the role of the panopticon. When we do a knowledge flow analysis of an organization, we provide the same function, offering individuals a “virtual mirror” based on their communication behavior. But other than the Panopticon, we only offer a condensed view of the organization to management – transparency for the individual, but guaranteeing their privacy to management, only releasing individual information at the request of the individual.