The Six Degrees World of Inventors
December 16th, 2004David Teten links to and article titled, “Caves, Clusters, and Weak Ties: The Six Degrees World of Inventors”, which appeared on the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge page. A quote:
“Six degrees of separation seems to work well for B-list actors—but does it have anything to say about innovation and business?
HBS associate professor Lee Fleming believes it does, and his work looks specifically at how ideas and innovation flow across company boundaries through small (and getting smaller) communities and collaborations of inventors. Fleming and his colleagues found, for example, that at the end of the last decade, half of the patented inventors in Silicon Valley could trace an indirect collaborative path to one another. Can you say Kevin Bacon?
“Our work and more recent work on knowledge diffusion demonstrates that knowledge flows along these collaborative relationships, even years after they were formed,” says Fleming. At the same time, the world of inventors “is getting smaller,” he says, “inventors are more connected to their colleagues in outside firms, and that knowledge is diffusing in both directions.”
One implication for executives: Don’t lock your scientists, researchers, and inventors in ivory towers. Your organization will benefit by the knowledge that flows to them from outside your company. Instead of asking ‘How can I make my R&D lab more productive?’ Fleming says a better question to ponder is, ‘How can I commercialize from this web of connected engineers?’”
The basic premise here is to understand the talent and expertise that exists not only in your own organization, but outside of it as well. Do librarians do this well? Are subject specific libraries utilized to their utmost capacity when researching a topic? Are the collective talents of our profession being used, or can we do better? QuestionPoint has made some strives in this arena, and WorldCat helps. Certainly, the new Google/Library initiative has the potential to work in our collective favor if properly marketed and utilized well (and we won’t know that for a long time).
I believe that our first work in librarian collective wisdom is to tap into those librarians that we work with on a daily basis. Get to know them, their interests, their specialties, their hobbies. And why just do this with librarians? We had staff at the library where I worked that knew more than any reference book could tell us about certain queries (especially computer assistance). After that, learn about librarians from around our county, state, the national level. A social software tool for librarians only comes to mind, although I’m not sure that this would work. This interaction needs to be face to face. I learn more about colleagues when I meet with them at conferences and meetings. I couldn’t even attempt to calculate the quality of “circle sessions” we had in that bar in the Portola Hotel in Monetery last month. Again, get out from behind that desk.
John Lovitz used to say on SNL, “Get to Know Me.” How true.