Swarm Creativity Blog

March 7th, 2010, the 82nd Academy Awards, commonly known as Oscars, will be given out for best picture, for best actor and actress, and in 21 other categories. Two years ago we successfully predicted who would win an Oscar Award, almost two months before the Awards were actually given out. This blog post contains our first predictions for the 2010 Oscars, more than three months before the Awards will be actually given out. There are other places on the Web also making Oscar predictions, for example movie site moviefone and Internet betting site intrade : While the above predictions are made by experts (moviefone) and people placing bets on the outcome (intrade), our approach simply measures what the Web (this means all of us) thinks. It works by multiplying the “how many” with the “who”, i.e. multiplying what somebody says with her/his influence. Below are our combined coolhunting results, based on evaluating the buzz in the Oscar Forum in the Internet movie database imdb.com an...

The principles of the Chinese philosophy of Taoism have many parallels with the ways how COINs operate. The way is the goal - Tao means “way”, and “way” is the cornerstone of Taoism. This is very different from Western philosophies, where the “being” and “truth” are in the center. In Taoism, on the other hand, “the way is the goal”, this means it’s not the solution, which is important, but the way to get to the solution. COINs achieve their big vision in many small incremental steps along the way. It is the way, the joy of completing small incremental steps together, which are the main motivators for COIN members. Working extremely hard in the company of likeminded people and reaching a goal together is immensely rewarding. This way of working under positive stress is similar to the concept of “ flow ” defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. According to Csikszentmihalyi, people are most happy when they are in the state of flow – a state of complete absorption with the activity at hand ...

I am writing this blog post on my way back from the first Conference on Collaborative Innovation Networks COINs2009 . It was a cool event, taking place Oct. 8-11 2009 at SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design. SCAD was a fitting place and perfect host for this conference, with its mascot the bee, paragon of collaborative swarms. The themes of the COINs conference cover a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as social network analysis, group dynamics, design and visualization, information systems and the psychology and sociality of collaboration. Thinking about these topics in the plane on the trip back to Boston, it dawned on me that the time has come to put these topics into a solid scientific framework. While it has been scientifically recognized that swarms of bees are better thought of as one big superorganism, it is only now that similar insights are coming up for the human superorganism . Slowly this human superorganism is starting to become self aware with the ind...

Tomorrow September 27th, 2009, there are elections to the German parliament. It's the conservative (by German standards) CDU/CSU led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, against the social democrats (SPD) led by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, with the liberal democrats (FDP,Guido Westerwelle) and the Green party (Jürgen Trittin) as minor players. Predictions still seem to project a win of CDU, although it is not clear if CDU and FDP together will get a clear majority. A quick coolhunting in blogs seems to speak a clear language: Angela Merkel seems the clear leader, being in a sphere of her own, and her competitors huddled together in the other corner. SPD candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier has a large support network, although of lesser influence. But wait! What we are looking at above is what the WORLD thinks and blogs - and there Angela Merkel, as the incumbent Chancellor, has a huge advantage. If we zoom in on German language blogs, using the German title "Bundeskanzl...

In the last three posts I have looked at what the crowd on the Web was saying about the chances of the 3 main candidates for Swiss Federal Councilor in the elections of Sept. 16 to succeed Bundesrat Pascal Couchepin. And note that we had to predict what the crowd was thinking what the 248 members of the Swiss National Assembly would be doing. The ranking was (see three previous posts): 1. Urs Schwaller 2. Christian Luescher 3. Didier Burkhalter If you look at the voting in the Assembly yesterday, it is (from Wikipedia) So the crowd PERFECTLY predicted the voting pattern in round 1! The group dynamics in the Assembly in the succeeding rounds, and in particular the behavior of individual people like the withdrawal of Christian Luescher after round 3, the crowd can NOT predict, that's up to Mr Luescher - there are still good uses for the crystal ball.

Tomorrow Sept 16 will be the elections for next Swiss Federal Councillor in succession of Pascal Couchepin. Here the latest coolhunting results on the blogs for the four main candidates:

The elections for the successor of Swiss Federal Councilor (Bundesrat) Pascal Couchepin will be this Wednesday, Sept 16. Here is a new update on the trend prediction, as of this evening, Sunday Sept 13. Again the disclaimer is that it is not the Swiss population who is electing the Bundesrat, but the 248 members of parliament, which of course makes it much harder to predict the outcome. Nevertheless, here first the general trend for the currently three official candidates, Christian Lüscher, Didier Burkhalter, and Urs Schwaller, and three other candidates based on the "electoral votes", i.e. Web Betweenness of the Swiss German bloggers for the last three days. Christian Lüscher lost his lead, Urs Schwaller is the leader, Dominique de Buman is number two. This is based on the accumulated coolhunting in the German language blogosphere over the last week: Weltwoche.ch, Bernerzeitung.ch, and Politreport.ch are the most influential Blogs - the kingmakers - to promote the candidat...

After I did my first automatic coolhunting yesterday, I got feedback that I had forgotten to include one of the main candidates, Christian Lüscher (FDP, Geneva) into my coolhunting. So I repeated the process for both the German and French speaking parts of Switzerland. Here are the results: Web in French speaking Switzerland: Blogs in French speaking Switzerland: Web in German speaking Switzerland: Blogs in German speaking Switzerland To resume: The French speaking Swiss favor non-candidate Fulvio Pelli, both in long term recognition (Web) and prospects for tomorrow (Blog). For the German speaking Swiss, Christian Lüscher is the clear favorite, particularly on the blogs. Looking at the social network on the Swiss German Web confirms the central position of Christian Lüscher: So what are the main lessons: automatic coolhunting needs to be complemented by human coolhunters - thank you for pointing out my omission of Christian Lüscher. The automatic coolhunting system is only as good as...

Sept 16, 2009, the Swiss Federal Assembly will elect the successor of longtime Swiss Federal Councillor Pascal Couchepin, who will step back after over ten years in office. The Swiss Federal Council is the executive seven-member council who serves as the collective head of state of Switzerland. Although this means that not the entire Swiss population, but the Swiss Federal Assembly - an admittedly biased subsample of 246 mostly male (75%) members of the Swiss establishment - will vote for the next Federal Councillor, it will still be very interesting to see what the entire swarm of all Swiss thinks who will be the next Federal Councillor. For my coolhunting I looked at the popularity of 8 leading candidates (Martine Brunschwig Graf, Dominique de Buman, Fulvio Pelli, Urs Schwaller, Daniel Brelaz, Jean-Francois Rime, Pascal Broulis, Didier Burkhalter). I ran the queries both on the Web, and just for blogs. I also checked who is the most popular candidate among the Swiss Germans by adding...

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 th...

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 ...

“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 co...

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 ...

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

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 in...

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 LiveO...

Today's NYT describes a list of computer programmers turned entrepreneurs, creating cool apps for the iPhone. With the barriers to entry as low as they are here: one basically just needs a computer to download the app developer kit, plus of course programmer skills, this is the perfect opportunity for swarm business. People like Ethan Nicholas, a (former) Java developer at Sun, making $800,000 with a shooter game, are the new members of the swarm. Apple, handling sales and marketing including money collection though its App store, proves once more superb coolfarming skills.

Today the "A World of Possibilities" Radio Show published my interview with host Mark Sommer talking about Open Innovation, Swarm Creativity, COINs, and the role and inspiration of bees.

In a blogpost on January 8 I spoke about the CoolTrend prediction system for the Zurich mayoral elections I had set up. At that time candidate Corinne Mauch was already ahead of candidate Kathrin Martelli. In the meantime our Coolhunting system collected the statistics from the blogosphere every day (see picture below: Until the main elections on February 8 things were fuzzy, with Corinne Mauch and Kathrin Martelli changing the lead a few times. In the elections February 8 - again as predicted by our tool - Martelli had a slight lead over Mauch, but not enough to overcome the absolute majority threshold, which means that a second round became necessary. After February 16 things became clear in the blogosphere, Corinne Mauch always had a solid lead. Towards the end, Kathrin Martelli's buzz went up also - not surprisingly, as in the final days bloggers from both sides became more active. But it was never enough to challenge the lead of Corinne Mauch, and so she easily won the elec...

Web Science 2.0 – Online Analysis of Entrepreneurship Activity at German Universities Which university is the place to go to become a successful entrepreneur? Where do I find a strong entrepreneurial network and prosperous environment to start off my business? By mining and analyzing online social networking sites we found interesting answers to these questions. Out of representative samples of alumni students from eleven German universities we retrieved company and startup founders as well as other executives. We looked at the largest universities including high potential institutions (LMU Munich, TU Munich, and University of Karlsruhe) and top ranked private business schools (European Business School (EBS) and WHU Vallendar). On average we identified 1,070 people that match the entrepreneurial profile. Through our sources we were also able to get internal and external relationships for every entrepreneur. By loading this data into our powerful social network analysis machine Condor w...

Wednesday afternoon I had a visit by Betsey Merkel from I-Open Education , in its own words "...a community that shares best practices in collaborative leadership, networks and Strategic Doing to strengthen Open Source Economic Development". She did a really nice video interview that gives an overview in a nutshell of the principles of COINs and swarm creativity (you will need to register first).

Today the Swiss voted about extension of the right of free movement and residence with the rest of the European Union. The vote was brought by the extension of the right of free movement and residence (Personenfreizügigkeit) to new EC member states Rumania and Bulgaria, which had previously been approved by the Swiss government. The right-wing people's party collected enough votes against it to ask for a referendum. The vote was today, and according to early polls it started looking good for the supporters of the right of freedom and movement. I wanted to know what the Web and Blog would predict, and here are the Coolhunting results: on the Web: Yes (Personenfreizügigkeit Annahme) 73% No (Personenfreizügigkeit Ablehnung) 27% on the Blogs: Yes (Personenfreizügigkeit Annahme) 58% No (Personenfreizügigkeit Ablehnung) 42% By now (Feb 8, 4 pm), the final results are here, and the right on freedom on movement and residence (Personenfreizügigkeit) has been approved by the Swiss voters wit...

Recently (see my previous blog post) I was interviewed by a journalist from the Washington Post about how cool Washington is. Her conclusion was that DC is not cool. This led to a backlash of negative reactions - I got my share of it also, see the post here and the comments on the original story. I would like to point out there are very cool places in Washingon. There is for example the hotel I stayed in one of my last trips to DC, the Tabard Inn , a very cool boutique hotel. But there are also less cool things in DC, like when I was scheduled to give a presentation on Collaborative Innovation at the World Bank, and was not let in for 45 minutes because security was so tight they could not find anybody with the right credentials to identify me. But actually it would be quite easy to make Washington very cool. Cool places are made by cool people, and one of them just started in his new job last week. It’s now up to all of us to get more of the same to Washington!

Yesterday the Washington Post published a timely opinion piece on “how to make D.C. cool” , pondering the question whether Washington D.C. could ever be cool. The journalist had interviewed me for this article, and the discussion with her got me thinking about what it takes to make a place “cool”. Why is it that NYC, SF, or Boston are cool, while D.C, a popular tourist destination, seems in dire want of coolness? Let’s first look at what makes things cool. “Cool” things have four properties. First, they need to be fresh and new , we don’t want yesterday’s stale old ideas, but radically new and better ones. Apple is cool, Microsoft is not. Why? By ushering in a new era in computers with the Macintosh, in music players with the iPod, or in mobile phones with the iPhone, Apple has shown a unique knack in coming up with beautiful new things. Microsoft may be more profitable, and having grown to much bigger size with its copycat strategy, but nobody has ever accused it of being cool – tha...

There is a hot race currently between the two ladies Kathrin Martelli and Corinne Mauch for the succession of the popular mayor of Zurich, Elmar Ledergerber, who stepped back recently. I was curious to see what Web and Blog have to say about the chances of the two candidates. Here is the Coolhunting result of Condor for today on the Blog (Jan 8th, 2009) - Corinne Mauch leads with 53% Repeating the same process on the Web, to get the more long term trend, leads to the same result - it looks even worse for Kathrin Martelli who gets only 35% of the Coolhunting vote. We will know Feb 8, after the election. The only thing certain: Zurich's next mayor will be female.