Swarm Creativity Blog

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...