Peter Gloor, Research Scientist, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence 03-19-09 Interview

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Interview and transcription March 18, 2009

Peter Gloor, Research Scientist, MIT Center for Collective
Intelligence, COINS – Collaborative Innovation Networks

Q: What are you most passionate about? [00:01:22]
A: COINS! Collaborative Innovation Networks!

Hello, I’m Peter Gloor and I’m a Research scientist at the MIT Center
for Collective Intelligence and my big passion is COINS -
Collaborative Innovation Networks – and that is something I have
been fascinated with for a very long time. I was in industry for ten
years as a Manager for two big consulting firms and what I found was
that much more than technology what really matters is people and
new ideas. And what I found is that if I was working with like-minded
people in those COINS – Collaborative Innovation Networks - that
was the time I was energized the most and it really was the best thing
to really create new ideas; you work to solve any big problems of the
world. So, that is the really big thing, those COINS that I have been
studying for the last six years or so.

Q: What would you like people to know, think, feel and do?
[00:01:19]
A: Work Together!

So what would I like people to know, and think, and feel? I think it’s
about working together, about getting an understanding, about being

Copyright 2010 Betsey Merkel and I-Open. Creative Commons 3.0
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. Institute for Open
Economic Networks (I-Open) 4415 Euclid Ave 3rd Fl Cleveland, Ohio
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all members of a swarm and these COINS – these Collaborative
Innovation Networks – for me, they are the main building blocks of
those self-organizing groups of people that I call the swarms. I have
stumbled on this idea of the swarm by chance when I was in Paris
with my children and we were looking for restaurants and on the first
day we ended up on top of Monte Martre, which is the place where all
the tourists go so what we did at that time was we did not follow the
swarm we followed the crowd. The food was okay and there were
tons of tourists. Next day we went to the concierge in the hotel and
we asked his advice and we got good food at a very high price, so
that was asking the ‘expert.’ The last day we followed the swarm ,
which means we followed the ‘locals’ and we got by far the very best
food at a very decent price. So, this concept of the swarm and swarm
creativity that is something that I think everybody should be aware of
and being part of the swarm that makes us feeling good and it’s just
this unbelievably energizing group or part or feeling or thing where we
believe we can change the world. There are so many applications of
this swarm creativity and that starts by just instead of running a
project as a conventional project, if you run it as a self-organizing
swarm, you will get much better results. I have a very simple rule in
that regard and it means do not pay people in the beginning, just
advertise what you want to do and then hopefully you will find some
people, they might join you and some might leave you but overall you
get better results, you get the people who care, you have much more
fun doing it, and you get unbelievable results. I have seen that, for
example in building our own software, it was a slow process, I went
through many graduate students, but what we got in the end was, it’s
a great product and it actually analyzes swarms.

Swarm Creativity is...Working together & being part of one
world. [00:04:06]

I will go on a little bit about the aspect of what creative swarms can
do and what we are, how we are putting it to productive use and one
thing that the swarms do is they express themselves in blogs and on
landforms and so on, and if we look at what they say we assume they
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“put their money where their mouth is” or to phrase it differently, “they
will do tomorrow what they say today “ or to phrase it even more
differently, we can predict what’s going to happen tomorrow by
reading the collective mind of today and that’s a project we are doing
right now and we call that ‘collective prediction’ and one thing we did
and its of course easy to say that today is predicting the success of
Barack Obama. The point is we compared what people were saying
on blogs, like Huffington Post and so on, more than 18 months ago,
and sadly Hillary Clinton had always very low buzz and Barack, he
was able to raise incredible excitement there and that predicted very
well what happened. But you can also apply the same thing for much
more straightforward things like what movie will be successful at the
box office because people walk with their feet so they say “I’m going
to see that movie” and if we look at online forums like for example,
the Internet movie database, there we have the people that are
passionate movie goers talking about what they would like to see that
will predict where they will go tomorrow. So, it’s a very fancy way of
reading the mind of the swarm and predicting what people are doing
tomorrow. The same thing we can also do if we look at e-mail
communication inside companies, the same thing we do if we look at
interaction networks through social badges which are those things
that people wear around their necks and we can then put that to use
for example by finding the most creative individuals, we can help
groups of people or individuals be more creative based on their
interaction patterns and the goal is to always empower the individual
to form a self-organizing swarm by exposing those patterns of
interaction, the positive patterns of interactions and this allows us to
predict which are the most creative teams and how we can make
teams more creative. We have done projects for example between
Japanese and American researchers and we measured how they
communicate with each other and what we found is that in the
beginning we represented every researcher as a big circle and the
size of the circle was how active somebody was and the color of the
circle was how much other people paid attention to what the person
was saying. And in the beginning we had three or four very white
circles and some small green circles. Now you might wonder which
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was the Japanese and which ones were the Americans – I think you
might guess how it was – but the point is we showed those circles to
the researchers every evening, what we got in the end was a very
well balanced group of somewhat introvert Japanese that were
saying much more and extrovert Americans who were saying too
much in the beginning, but in the end, all of them, and very quickly,
became very engaged active collaborators, so this is a great system
of increasing group creativity and making everybody a much better
creative person. I think that is perhaps enough for now.

Q: What category of the Innovation Framework do you invest
your time and attention? [00:08:14]

A: Okay, so the Innovation Framework that I think is the most
interesting is not surprisingly the COIN Collaborative Innovation
Networks Framework which we have been developing which consists
of the COIN in the core which has a larger concentric circle around it
of people which are in the learning network, collaborative learning
network, and then an even bigger network around which is the
Collaborative Interest Network. It works extremely well for example if
we look at Open Source programmers where if you take the example
of the creation of either Linux or the World Wide Web we have the
initial group of people that could be Linus Torvald for Linux or Tim
Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web. He gets this five to ten people
to collaborate, he doesn’t pay them, they are very intrinsically
motivated and they create a great system that in due course changes
the world and they attract other people that learn about those ideas
the Collaborative Learning Network and then even more people get
attracted and that’s usually when the financial element comes in for
the Collaborative Interest Network. So, this is in my view a never-
ending engine of innovation. And if we look at Open Source that’s a
great example and open innovation is not a framework that fits in very
well so to address the question of, “How would I like to link it?” I think
I would look at how to combine the COIN framework with open
innovation with Open Source innovation as the bigger idea that’s
certainly one thing that is for me very crucial. Now, on a more
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personal side, also what interests me very much is how can we take
our ideas and also get some immediate economic impact or to phrase
it differently, we have taken our ideas and we have created a start-up
which we call galaxy advisors, which means we help people not to be
stars but be galaxies, don’t be a star, be a galaxy, connecting other
people which means take our software and find the networks that is
very similar to what Valdis Krebs is doing with his Orgnet and InFlow
system and we are trying to do the similar things by finding those
galactic networks, galaxy people, of the web for example, or email
and then trying to help them be more creative. One the one hand we
do that as researchers and the other hand we have our software and
this has now already been used by quite a few companies trying to do
the same thing. Now I have to say its really the company’s that
wouldn’t need it are the most open to those ideas because they might
already be organized as little galaxies or they have some level of
open source innovation, or open innovation but still what we found is
that by giving people a virtual mirror that mirrors back how people
communicate that’s a great way of creating more innovation and
making people more open. Very similar to the example I was
describing before of the microscopic level where you have the social
batches and you have the people in the beginning who only talk
nobody listens to them and the other ones who don’t dare to speak
out and by exposing that, mirroring that back, we get in the end a
much more innovative organization.

Q: How does your work affect global sustainability? [00:12:12]

A: I think those theories of COINS Collaborative Innovation Networks
have great applicability to address those big questions that concern
mankind right now. Like, global warming, climate change, getting a
more sustainable environment, because what we need are those
intrinsically motivated people who want to do things not to paid but to
solve the problem. I have been involved as an advisor and active
member of communities. We have an initiative right here at the
Center for Collective Intelligence on climate change where we are
trying to form those communities, we have been very fortunate to find
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some people some local support here in the Boston communities,
some founders of some big companies have been supporting us
and… now it has spread out …we are trying to connect communities
with these around the world and obviously having a good brand like
MIT behind helps somewhat so I mean having the best people, its
still, you need that platform to carry out the message and this is a
great place for doing it.

Q: What areas of research interest you and why? [00:13:33]

A: So my research areas are sort of have been evolved over the last
thirty years, I was trained as a mathematician, then my PhD was in
computer science, then I became a natural scientist and these days I
am shifting more and more toward sociology and psychology so I am
probably just this weird guy who is connecting many different fields or
as we call that in social network analysis which is perhaps the best
description today of my research field, ‘ bridging structural holes’ or
being a gate keeper between many different fields so that is the sort
of my main area and I am very happy that I already get through this
interview today some better connection to Valdis Krebs a guy I
always love interacting with, there are of course many others, we had
a brief discussion about XX I admire I don’t know if there is ever a
chance of meeting him or some other psychologists that for example
study energy and how people exchange energy and what energizes
us in becoming more creative. There is great creativity research,
there is a fellow I have a hard time pronouncing his name, Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, I don’t know if you have stumbled on it that has
been sort of an inspiration to me so, what I try to do is to very much
step on the shoulders of giants, and if there is a chance of talking to
someone or living giants even better. To be an innovator or having, I
try to be coming up with new ideas the best way is to talk to people
who are smarter than myself, learn from them and mix together their
ideas and try to steal the best for myself so interacting with other
smart people and that can be physicist, because they have studied
lots of networks, that can be psychologists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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that I just mentioned and combining their ideas, I think that is what
drives me.

Q: What networks are you building? How? Why? [00:16:04]

A: 16:20 Network building is in fact one of my favorite activities and I
am just coming back from the Sunbelt Conference which is the
annual gathering of researchers on social network analysis and they
have something, a great institution, which they call the ‘Hospitality
Suite’ in the evening which basically means you can drink as much as
you want and you just talk to each other, its great for building
networks, but that is a very informal process, and diversity, and
randomness, serendipity, those are all essential ingredients for
network building, but one can still try to put it on a somewhat more
systematic footing, and I call that process ‘Cool Farming’ – create or
farm cool trends and we have our own COIN which we call COIN2 or
COIN on COINS, Collaborative Innovation Network on other COINS
and it is basically a group of researchers in Helsinki, in Germany, in
Italy, and about five places in the U.S. and we have some people in
Savannah, we have people at Wright (?) State, we have people in
Berkeley, and we have people in the Boston area, we have people at
Dartmouth, and we get together virtually, we meet at places like
Hospitality Suite at Sunbelt, we go and have beer together, but we
also work very hard to produce papers together, we even sometimes
do an occasional start-up together to commercialize some of those
ideas because my experience is that every successful start-up in the
beginning is a COIN because you have an idea, you do care more
about the idea than making money and then you get the next Google.
That’s if you take your – that’s my heretical view your spelled out
business plan where you have to follow my quarterly report after
quarterly report it doesn’t work. But putting together smart brains and
a great vision that’s a much better recipe and that’s what we do with
network building.

Q: What enterprise opportunities do you see? [00:18:33]

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A: So, what are the next networking, enterprise opportunities that I
see in my context? I thin Web 2.0, social networking software, that’s I
in my area of expertise a really hot area. I lived through e-Business
Bubble 1.0. At that time I was the e-Business practice leader for
Deloitte consulting in Europe and it was the one time where we had
more work than we could ever deliver and I don’t think that time will
ever return, the Golden Years. But for right now for social networking
software and trying to help people connect, trying to help people
come up with new ideas and trying to tell what happens tomorrow.
Even in those very difficult times right now we are very active in doing
it we have just started our start-up galaxy advisors and together with
seven students out of which five are full time in the start-up, we are
marketing out social networking software, we give it away for free to
academic institutions just because we think we should share what we
have got with others too and also this is a great way of getting
wonderful people, highly talented people, intrinsically motivated
people applying all the principles I was talking about and getting the
ones that care about the ideas and not the ones that want to get the
high salary from day one works extremely well for us. I have also
been involved in a course teaching for the last four years at Helsinki,
Germany, Savannah, southern Italy, and MIT and its about creating
student COINS using our software, analyzing real organizations,
communication network and online community communication
networks and this has already turned out into incubating two or three
companies that those virtual student teams which had Finns, and
Italians and Germans and Americans all collaborating and they hadn’t
met face to face. I have taken some of them now to San Diego to the
Sunbelt Conference where they met for the first time face to face,
great experience, and some of them have now started their own
business ventures in that field and we have started ours, so again it’s
trying to apply the same ideas of those COINS and growing them to
bigger ecosystem and doing Cool Farming with cool ideas works
extremely well.

Q: Describe your work as a collaborative leader… [00:21:25]

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A: Okay, so perhaps combining the question of sustainability and
participative leadership, or collaborative leadership, I have been
involved in trying to get the Internet and the computer to the
developing world. We have a project, and a Foundation that collects
used computers here and brings them to Africa. I was in Kenya, I was
in Ghana, and I was trying to get computers to classrooms. Its
different from the One Laptop Per Child, Nicholas Negroponte – it’s
much more modest, we get just used computers that people don’t
want anymore, we check that they work and then we get them to the
classroom and this is an absolutely collaborative experience on our
side. What we found is that it’s not so easy in the Third World it still
seems that sometimes there needs to be a hierarchical leader
otherwise things don’t work, but overall, I think on our side it only
works if you get a group of people that all care about the idea, and
obviously there is no money to pay anybody anyway because you
want to put everything into a, invest all the resources you have into
computers and getting them over there, and again, for me, it was
another great learning experience of the COIN model and in fact,
even in Ghana, getting the community engaged, getting the school
children, I was really impressed, we had the teachers and they
couldn’t really, they didn’t know what to do with the computers and
then we had the twelve to sixteen year olds and they have probably
been in an Internet café once or twice, and so they just came and
they unpacked the computers after two hours we had everything
connected and they were already sitting behind the computers and
using them. It was very impressive, self-organization and this little
COINS they are learning from each other: one guy figured out how to
connect the cables and then the others took it up and it just worked. A
great experience.

Q: What has inspired your work today? [00:23:38]

A: So, the main inspiration for this Swarm Creativity framework,
principle and the way those COINS Collaborative Innovation
Networks operate, are the Bees. I was exposed to Bees very early on
because my Father was, and still is, a very active Bee keeper so I
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grew up with Bees and he admired them for his entire life and so he
sort of instilled that into me also and the more I studied how those
COINS and human beings interoperate, the more I found we really
can be inspired by the Bees and you know a Bee queen never orders
any Bee to do something, the Bee just knows it because they share
the same DNA and for me the way how COINS work together is
precisely the same. You have a share set of values, and you have
initially some Bee queen or you might have a group of Queens and
that’s probably different because as you know in the Bee hive the
Queens kill each other they only let one Queen be the Queen at one
time otherwise the hive splits or you have the fight. There are some
parallels to that also in Open Source there are some very highly
publicized fights where for example in this Apache open source group
you got some leadership changes fairly quickly so again the pattern
of the Bees applies, but overall, COINS and Bees are unbelievably
well in adopting to external change, being very flexible and just do
unbelievable things in creating new hives, honey combs, collecting
honey and finding new locations. Actually, the ‘finding new locations’
process, for me that’s a great metaphor for how we get new ideas,
because we have the Bee Queen taking off with half of the swarm
towards a new direction and that’s the same if you have new ideas,
and then what we have is we have the scouts, the Bee scouts, that
look for greener pastures that go out and we have the same thing for
the COINS, we have this first group of scouts and they are the initial
COIN and then they come back to the swarm, they report on those
new ideas, and then we have the Bee swarm, as you know, the Bee
queen takes this swarm, they fly to an intermediate place where they
form this cluster and then the scouts come back and they do the
Bagel dance where they tell about the new location, and in the COIN
you have the same. You have people doing the Bagel dance. That’s
the only way how I try to recruit people, by doing the Bagel dance, so
I tell, like right now, I just tell about new ideas and that builds up the
heat in the swarm and at some point, in the cluster of the Bees, the
scouts change from the Bagel dancing to just building up the heat.
Which means in the Bee cluster that happens by piping at each other
and so the sound goes up, the heat goes up in the cluster and the
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same for COINS. The heat goes up and suddenly the cluster
explodes and that’s when the idea gets over the tipping point. The
cluster explodes, the Bees go out and they change the world with the
new idea and that’s the same for COINS.

With our generous thanks to Peter Gloor.
The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open)
4415 Euclid Ave 3rd Floor Cleveland Ohio 44103 USA
Creative Commons License
Attribution-Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 United States

Biographical Information

• http://cci.mit.edu/pgloor/

Research

• http://www.ickn.org/
• http://www.ickn.org/html/ckn_publications.htm

Company

• Galaxy Advisors
• http://www.galaxyadvisors.com

Blog

• Swarm Creativity Blog
• http://www.swarmcreativity.net/

Books

Swarm Creativity - Competitive Advantage through Collaborative
Innovation Networks
http://www.amazon.com/Swarm-Creativity-Competitive-Collaborative-
Innovation/dp/0195304128
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Coolhunting - Chasing Down The Next Big Thing
http://www.amazon.com/Coolhunting-Chasing-Down-Next-
Thing/dp/0814473865/ref=pd_sim_b_1

Coolfarming – Turn Your Great Idea Into the Next Big Thing
http://www.amazon.com/Coolfarming-Turn-Your-Great-
Thing/dp/0814413862/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=12812899
60&sr=1-1

Contact Information

Peter A. Gloor
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
Cambridge MA
pgloor@mit.edu
+1 617 253 7018(o)
+1 617 512 6556 (m)

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Peter Gloor, Research Scientist, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence 03-19-09 Interview

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