Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Friday, November 15, 2002One other thing that Stuart Kauffman said has been rattling around my head. In the lecture I attended, Kauffman asserted, "Work is the constrained release of energy." By that definition, work requires boundaries. As a theoretician, Kauffman wonders how the boundaries get constructed.
Starbucks knows*. Years ago, it recognized that need for a "third place" between work and home. It saw the opportunity to define new boundaries -- in the form of high-end coffee shops -- to enable the kind of human interactions that don't always fit within the constraints of home or office. It's worked brilliantly.
We've come to understand at our company, Small World Networks, that we're in the business of catalyzing boundaries that allow entrepreneurial learning and other work to get done. In many instances, we architect "spaceless" boundaries that draw upon topical focus, selective participation, and timing to create requisite context.
*Okay, maybe the folks at Starbucks can't tell Kauffman how the universe, itself, got partitioned, but they apparently know something about how to partition social space.
