Coolfarming Ideas through Knowledge Flow Optimization - Boosting Organizational Performance through E-Mail Social Network Analysis
Over the last fifteen years our research group at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, University of Cologne and University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) has studied hundreds of organizations through the lens of their social networks, extracted from the organization’s e-mail archive. Among many others we have studied R&D organizations at car manufacturers, marketing departments at banks, sales teams at high tech manufacturers, medical researchers and doctors at large hospitals, and service delivery teams at large consulting and service provider firms. In addition, we have also looked at collaboration in open source organizations like Eclipse software developers, Wikipedians, and online communities on Facebook and elsewhere. We have developed a 4-Step Process which we call “Knowledge Flow Optimization” to study and increase the performance of organizations, to “coolfarm ideas” (see figure below). It consists of the fou...