Swarmcreativity Through COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks)

Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) are at the core of collaborative knowledge networks, distributed communities taking advantage of the wide connectivity and the support of communication technologies, spanning beyond the organizational perimeter of companies on a global scale. Collaborative Innovation Networks, or COINs, are made up of groups of self-motivated individuals, linked by the idea of something new and exciting, and by the common goal of improving existing business practices, new products or services for which they see a real need. COINs also work to improve social, scientific, and healthcare innovation. Their strength is related to their ability to activate creative collaboration, knowledge sharing and social networking mechanisms, affecting positively individual capabilities and organization performance.

COINs are powered by swarm creativity, wherein people work together in a structure that enables a fluid creation and exchange of ideas. Patterns of collaborative innovation frequently follow an identical path, from creator to COIN to collaborative learning network to collaborative interest network.

The emergence of online social networks opens up unprecedented opportunities to read the collective mind, discovering emergent trends while they are still being hatched by small groups of creative individuals collaborating in COINs. The Web has become a mirror of the real world, allowing researchers in predictive analytics to study and better understand why some new ideas change our lives, while others never make it from the drawing board of the innovator. Methods for analysis are based on analysis of large corpora of digital traces of human activity, in particular the Web, Blogs, online forums, social networking sites, e-mail archives, phone logs, and face-to-face interaction through using sociometric badges.